Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, The - Volume 12 Issue 9 (1995-09)(Storm Front Studios)(AU)

September 1 995 - Volu

a 12, m l J

$5.95 (NZ $8 inc. GST)

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users

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UK to ship
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http://www.sigma.com.au

AMIGA MULTIMEDIA SPECIALISTS

CD

AMIGA HARD DRIVES

sd

■ 420Mb FAST SCSI-2
" 850Mb FAST SCSI 2

1 ,08Gb FAST SCSI-2

1 ,44Gb FAST SCSI-2

2.1Gb FAST SCSI-2

545Mb IDE
850Mb IDE
1Gb IDE
1.2Gb IDE

40Mb 2.5" IDE
260Mb 2.5" IDE
340Mb 2.5" IDE
524Mb 2.5" IDE

SyQuest 88Mb int. 5.25" $499

a Syquest 105Mb int. 3.5" $449

M Syquest 270Mb int. 3.5" $649

J^ 44Mb Syquest Cartridge S1 29

88Mb Syquest Cartridge $109

105Mb Syquest Cartridge $1 09

270Mb Syquest Cartridge $1 29

250Mb Tape Cartridge $59

IOMEGA ZIP DRIVE too™

$349

$529

$799

$1099

$1699

$299
$399
$499
$549

$199
$369
$469

HIGH DENSITY FLOPPIES

High Density Floppy Drives for a
Amlgas. All you reed is WB 2 installed
on your machine. Now you will be able
to react 1.76M Amiga disks & 1.44M
IBM-PC formated disks.

Internal for A4000 (Slimline version) :/J^'J
External for All Amigas ; J -j'J

A3000 ZIP RAM

We have limited stocks of A3000 Static column Ram

ASIM CDFS VERSION 3

The AsimCD File System 3.0 package consists of AsimTunes,
AsimCDFS, CDTV and CD32 emulation modules. It also includes
the Fish Market CD- Rom.

* riill. PhoiuCD supp'jti - ll{> io 'm'i'J. J. 2LWii 2-JLii l?P

* fJ=iy~^D Audit) ihnjii'jh aiun&dtd J-'muisu uiidJu uu:

Sff

MaeSfrO V34 28.8k $499 FAX and DATA modems.
Mae$trO vfast 28.8k$399 include GPFax Software.

C YBER VISION 64

Pioneering art new generation
In graphics performance

— —

1600 X 1200 in up to 256 colours
1024 x 763 In up to 16 million colours

EPSON STYLOS COLOR

Cybervlsion 64 is produced in Germany by the
same company producing the Cyberstorm 68060
accelerator. The Cybervision64 satisfies the most
demanding graphic requirements with a 64 bit wide
graphics controller and fast 32 bit Zorro III
interface. Welcome to the new generation in
graphics performance. ^foH

For the Artist in you

The EPSON Stylus COLOR ink-jet printer
offers 16 million colours and 720 dpi
resolution, plus all theisatures - speed,

reliability, convenience arid economy - that
make the EPSON Stylus the perfect Amiga
printer.

SOFTWARE SPECIALS

Brilliance V2
PngeStreom V3
Pro Draw V3 _
DanStore
Cine Morph
WordworHiV3,1
Disk Expander
Power Copy ...
Dntn store

AMIGA

OS 3.1 m

oo

CD-ROM DRIVES

sony:

CDU-76Se

,Ww*L

_

External - Quad Spin
Mulli Session -Ho Caddy!
MPEG & CD1 Compliant

-WIS

W6V s§f

CDU-76S!

Internal - Quad Spin
Multi Session. No Caddy!
MPEG & CM Compliant

ELECTRONIC DESIGN- VIDEO QUAD CD-ROM FOR A I 200

ED Neptun Genlock

$1199

ED Y/C Genlock

$699

ED TBC Enhancer

$1699

SONY DIGITAL MULTISCAN

15" SFl Digital

1024x768ni $899

17" SFl Digital

1024x768ni $1749
20" Digital

1 280x1 Q24ni $4199
— — ~~ M L r I S C A hi

TTURBO CHARGE YOUR HI 200

DKB Cobra 28 $549

5&30 JBMhz - 41Mb 32blt RAM

DKB Cobra 40 $699

5X3C -iOMhz - 4Mb 32 bit RAM

DKB Mongoose 50 $899

69030 SQMhz - 4Mb 32Bit RAM - 68882

DKB 1202 $399

DKB 1202 + FPU $449

---.■ RAM + 68882 FPU

DKB SCSI add on , i-

E I E =: : :n far Mongoose or Coora

ii 5^y i j^li yiJjjUii •> Jj'jjjj ^jjjj

.>i

■j-yy

c) D "J ~J

Affordable SCSI CD-ROM
for your Al 200

3 rJjA CDH'l lliiuM'Ml

The new Quad speed CD-ROM for the Amiga 600^1 200 plugs directly
into the PCMCIA port and provides a direct SCSI interface, allowing up
to six additional periperals to be connected, for example:
Zip and SyQuest Drives, Hard Drives, Flatbed Scanners and DAT
Drives. What's more the Power CD-ROM features a "Hot-Plug" and
"Un-Plug" even when your Amiga is switched on.

SQUIRREL SCSI FOR A 1 200

PCMCIA SCSI Interface
For your Al 200/600

Fast PCMCIA SCSI interface
for your Amiga 1200 and 600.
Supports "Hot-Plug" and
"Un-Plug" Supports up to 7
SCSI-1 and SCSt-ll devices.

TTURBO CHARGE YOUR A4000

The Warp Engine is the only A4000
Accelerator that offers on-board
SCSI-2, 1 28 Meg RAM capacity and
40MHz 68040 performance. The
Warp uses standard 72 pin SIMM's
in any combimation. Also for

A3000CTI $2299

The CyberStorm 50MHz 68060 is
the first accelerator to offer Pentium
like speeds to A4000 owners.
Modular in design, the CyberStorm
has Fast SCSI-II, Ethernet and high
speed serial options. Its a must have
for the 3D artist. ? ) J )'l!)-- rJ )

Second hand Commodore 25MHz
68040 board for your A4000/030.
19 MIPs I at a special price.

uUD-lU

$599 IE

%*&

>mmmm mMMW4$

We Accept BankCaid, Visa, MasterCard, dMEX. & 4GG Credit
OPEN Mon-Fri 9HM-5PM SAT 10HM-4PM
Online Ordering - Call labyrinth BBS (021 580 5881

MOBILE: (01 8/ 25 7471

FflX.* {021 540 4554

Suite f 7, 20-24 Cibbs Street
Miranda NSW Australia 2228

Wb I

Jj.

y«» Amiga in HsMace!

?ssional DeskTop Video products from Sigmacont.

The Personal Animation
Recorder is shaping up to be one of
the most powerfull and popular Digital
Video cards for the Amiga.

Its quality has passed the
broadcast test at many of Australia's
commercial television networks. By
now I'm sure you have seen the PAR
output on television, but not know
you've been watching it!

Many of our clients are using
the PAR with 3D rendering packages
such as Lightwave to produce TV
commercials, Music videos and
much, much more.

Here are some of the reasons the
PAR has become so popular :-

- Broadcast resolution output

- Real time 25ps Playback of video

- Full 24Bit Colour

- Component output (Betacam® Mlf®)

- Y/C output (S-VHS^HiS®)

- Composite Video output

- Interface with any Amiga graphics s/w

With the Capture board you add even
more versatility :-

- Real fine 25fps Capture of live video

- Component input (Betacam® Mil®)

- Y/C input (S-VHS^HiSr 9 )

- Composite Video input

LI y hi Wijv^ 3D

it-VM+Dnh

«■■■

Tronsfonn your Amiga into an edit suite - with V4ab motion

Here at last.... an affordable,
broadcast resolution non-linear editing
system has finally arrived in the form
of V-Lab Motion!

Its a fully functional non-linear
editor and real time 24-bit animation
recorder with audio support via the
Toccata 1 6 bit stereo sampler card.

Full time line edit control with
A'B roll type interfades and wipes.
Also keying and "Blue Box" effects.

V-Lab Motion was "product of
the year" in AMIGA PLUS (Germany)
as well as a "Perfect 10" an AMIGA
::\'PUTlNG First.

Here are some of the features of the
V-Lab motion system :-

- Outstanding quality non-linear editor

- 16 bit audio with the Toccata

- Complete ARexx support

- Comprehensive digital effects

- Digital character generator

- Chroma keying for "Blue Box" FX

- Composite & Y/C inputs

- Composite & Y/C outputs

- Freely adjustable data rates

- Optional Component in/outputs

- Powerful Movie Shop Software

- Time Line & Hierarchical editing

- Use as animation recorder

- $2788 for V-Lab Motion

- $869 for Toccata

"The V-Lab Motion system will
blow your socks off! "

- Michael Ricks, Producer/Director

-- SUNSTONE PICTURES, Phoenix, Arizona

MM400 is the latest upgrade to
SCALA and adds multi-platform support
with the addition of the File format EX'S,
New text wipes, better anti-aliasing, X/Y
font scaling and more.

Coming soon will be SCALA MM100

The first real Multi Media software

for the IBM-PC platform.

m

AW sysimm yjj JJjjjJiiy

1$

FAX: 102} 540 4554
MOBILE: I018}257471

■

CONTENTS

Features

*11 Hot Amiga news

Want to know
the latest?

• • « • Read on!

17 Amiga netsurfing

The coolest sites
for Amiga users!

54 Almathera
Ten on Ten

• • • • CD-ROM super packs
come to the Amiga...

Articles

28 Guru-ROM

More speed for your
GVP controller -
••••* only $140!

36 Net news

Interesting places,
regulation attempts...

43 POSWIZ

Point-of-sale computing
on the Amiga

50 Aminet 7 and Prima 1

• • • •

i

Cover created by Jarrod Pudsey
Image; 1500x2000
Program; Lightwave 3.5
Machine: A4000!040/40MHz

65

78

Two more PD

CD-ROMS!

Games

Speedball II, Super
Skidmarks, PGA Tour,
ViroCop reviewed.

Modemspeak

AT commands
made easy!

4
8
10
20
22
27
30
32
34
44
48
58
60
63
62
74
80

September, J 95
Vol 12, No 9

Regulars

Editorial

Notepad

Media Watch

Letters

Help Line

Subscribe

Online

Wordprocessing

Workbench

HotPD

Desktop Publishing

lassifieds

Back Issues

Market Place

User Groups
Art Gallery

Ad Index

AMIGA Review

orm Front St ucRos

Editor
Andrew Fari^Il

Contributing Editor
Daniel Rutter

ArtlMrector
Stuart Farrell

Production
Jer^niy EaH

\Qfy : phic : $}Gruru.
jaTrod Pudsey

Advertising
RabnelBraier

FilmimdTnmgewttwg
Access Graphics

Printer

Hannaii^rint

Distrihutwn

NPD

SubscHptioHRotiine
TO BOX 278,

74431; 1224
fhi&net:
4431 «1224^eoinpii*erve.coiii

£<v {dvertising

tei: (02) 5.57 4266
02)5651220
data: (02)550 2499

Amigas

headed
downunder

I Every month I sit down to write this
column there seems to be something
positive to share. The trying thing is that
the increments are oh so small. The
good news for September? ESCOM, the
people who own the new Amiga Tech-
nologies, have set up their UK distribu-
tion.

Amiga Tech UK have been made re-
sponsible for distribution downunder!
This issue of Amiga Review was held
back in the hope that the local distribu-
tor could be announced. Well, one very
nearly has it in the bag - but was unfor-
tunately unable to lock off on things pri-
or to our final, final deadline.

As it stands, local supply of machines
is now only a matter of weeks away, and
by next issue we should be able to tell
you who it is.

The problem is, Amiga Technology
might be able to solve the hardware
dilemma, but making up for lost ground
on the software front is a tad more diffi-
cult. Here's a suggestion to the world of
Amiga developers that we've been
bouncing around here at Storm Front
Studios.

It is true that CD-ROM titles are driv-
ing the home computer market explo-
sion right now. It is a shame that some
of the best titles are not headed for the
Amiga. But there may be a simple way
around the problem. Instead of trying to
build our own Encarta equivalent, why
not simply develop a front end that runs
on the Amiga and looks at the text files,
animation and graphics stored on one of

these many PC CD-ROMs. So, you buy
Encarta, and you download or buy the
program to read the files, browse and
display them on the Amiga.

Yes, some work may be involved in
reverse engineering some of the index
files. Yes, some discs have the graphics
embedded in strange file formats. But
many, many titles that cross my desk
don't. Many could be made to work on
the Amiga with just a simple front end.
Even a game like MYST might have a
chance on a fast Amiga. So, how about
it? A really smart player might try li-
censing some of the know how to make
the production easier from a PC title
publisher. They'll probably figure the
market is tiny and sell the rights real
cheap.

By Andrew Farrell

AMIGA Review

Turn your Amiga into a
video editing suite

NO FUSS, INSTANT ACCESS, DIGITAL VIDEO EDITING

Capture VHS or SVHS (Y/C)
video, complete with stereo
sound - then edit, cut, paste and
immediately view or add special
effects, titles and more . . .

VLAB MOTION $2770

TOCCATA $810

. . . works on A2000/3000/4000
(Just add a fast SCSI hard drive)

**The ultimate

desktop video

solution."

4.3 GB SCSI

I] HD's from $2299

Warp Engines

from $1295

Best prices on 60ns SIMMS

FOR INFORMATION CALL

TV Graphics

(03) 521 2455 TEL
(03) 521 3945 FAX

COMING SOON: DRACO AMIGA COMPATIBLE - '060/RISC

Compute Magic P/L

44 Pascoe Vale Road

Moonee Ponds

Victoria 3039

Phone (03) 9326-0133

Fax (03) 9370-8352

SEPTEMBER SPECIALS

(LIMITED STOCKS, E&OE)

2MB PCMCIA CARDS FOR AMIGA A600/A1 200
$34*00 NOW ONLY $199.00

64G/SCALE HAND SCANNER WITH TOUCHUP V4.0

WITH MERGE FACILITY, AND OCR JR V1.5

$32%00 NOW ONLY $279.00

ROCGEN PLUS GENLOCK, A1200 COMPATIBLE

CALL FOR NEW LOWER PRICE

ROCTEC SUPER SLIMLINE EXTERNAL S80K DRIVES

ANTIVIRUS, ANTi CLICK

$4Gftffi> NOW ONLY $110.00

ROCHARD 500 SCSI KITS, ONLY A FEW LEFT,

CALL FOR DETAILS

DKB1202 -A1200 RAM CARD

CLEARING AT $140.00

DKB - COBRA 28 PRICE HAS DROPPED $CALL

HEAPS MORE AMIGA AND PC BARGAINS

COME IN AND SEE US, OR CALL FOR PRICING

WE ACCEPT AMEX, DINERS, BANKCARD, VISA,

MASTERCARD, EFTPOS, CHEQUE AND CASH

SPECIAL FREIGHT RATES FOR MAIL ORDER

CUSTOMERS

611 Beaufort St lit Lawhr, Perth
Ph: (09V 328 9062 Fax: (09) 275 1010

NOW IT IS COMING!
AMIGAs - 1200 - 4000

A4000/040/25 Tower 6Mb, 1.2Gb
A4000/060/50 Tower 6Mb, 1.2Gb

AMIGA Products

MegaMouse $29.99

Optical , .....$59,95

Trackball $59.95

External Drive $149.99

High Density $199.99

Implant

Squirrel! SCSI

CALL

$159

Iomega Zip Drives 700Mb

NEW!! A500/68020 EC Accel Card

A500/512KRAM $45

AG00/1Mb RAM..... £95

A12D2/NO CoPro/OMb $139

A1202/68882/020Mhz/0Mb..„ $149

A1202/68882/33Mhz/OMb $219

Cobra/030/28Mhz/0Mb/+clk.... $249

Cobra/040/40Mhzy0Mb/+clk $389

Mongoose/030/S0Mhz/QMb/+cfk$589

Oktagon SCSI/0(to 8Mb) .$249

DKB Mega-chip 2Mb/A50OW2OOO..$229

sony ce MML~~.?ro

Pomr CDAGM 2x or 4x

CD 32 Titles NEWS TOCKH
Coming In Weekly!!

Vidi Amiga.

Vidi Amiga 12RT..
Vidi Amiga 24RT.
YC Genlock

$129
$289

$429
$599

DynaLink 28,6k Externa! $380

14.4k External $250

5 year warranty

rfeiMl Djtes

210Mb 2.5" IDE $199

250Mb 2.5° IDE $249

40Mb 2.5" ????? $49

HARD DRIVES IDE/SCSI CALL

specsal PMcem

Check stock CD32 ads last
issue for low prices!!

Hard Disk Mechanisms

Quantum Drives:

• Trailblazer 420MB SCSI II $ 349-

• lightning 540MB SCSI II $ 399-

• Trail Blazer 850MB SCSI II $ 499-

• Fireball 1.08GB SCSI II $799-

• Adas 2.1GB SCSI II $1699-

A4000 Seagate IDE Drives:

• 545MB 12ms 120K cache $ 299-

• 850MB 1 1ms 256K cache $ 399-

• 1.05GB New Model $CALL

A 1200 Seagate 2.5" IDE Drives:

• 260 MB $ 369-

• 420 MB $ 479-
■810 MB $CALL
■ For other drive sizes please call.

Accelerators &
RAM Expansion

A500/600:

• A50O 51 2k RAM Expansion (no clock) S 49-

■ A500 51 2k RAM Expansion (with clock) $ 65-

■ A600 1MB RAM Expansion (no clock) $ 125-
•A600 1MB RAM Expansion (with clock) S 149-

A1200:

• GVP A1 230 ll/030/50MHz/4MB 1 teft$ 699-
•GVPA1 230 II 40MHz Co-Pro S 139-

• GVP A1 230 II 50MHz Co-Pro S 199-
•GVPA1291 (SuitA1230ll) $129-

A2000:

■ GVP 4008 SCSI {up to 8MB RAM) $ 269-

•DKBMegachip 2MB Chip Ram Expansion $ 339-

A3000:

■ 4 MB ZIP RAM Page Mode

■ 4 MB ZIP RAM Static Column

$ 320-
$ 340-

A4000:

■ Z3 Fastlane SCSI II & RAM Expansion from$ 699-

■ DKB 4091 SCSI-II Expansion Card $ 549-
• GVP 4008 SCSI (up to 8MB RAM) $ 269-
■GVP40MHz'040 4MB3abitRAM $1549-

■ Cyberstorm '060 50Mhz 52595-

FHYriV) d) - :

1200

/ / j J / /v \ m 1 ^. Accelerator

JU^MmB^ Products

1202, no Co-Pro, 0MB

$ 149

1202. 68882 @ 20MHz, 0MB

$ 189

1 202, 68882 @ 33MHz, 0MB

$ 229

Cobra '030MMU 28MHZ

$ 275

- no Co-Pro, 0MB

Cobra '030EC 40MHz

$ 449

- no Co-Pro, 0MB

Mongoose '030MMU 50MHz

$ 649

- 50MHz 68882, 0MB

SCSI-II Option for Cobra & Mongoose $ 1 89

RAM options available:

- 4MB 32 bit RAM

$ 250

-8MB 32 bit RAM

$ 500

- 16MB 32 bit RAM

$ 879-

PRODUCTIVITY SOFTWARE

1 Adorage AGA

$149.00

Imagemaster R/T 1.0 Special $ 99.00 j

i Amiback

$ 55.00

Impact (Lightwave)

$329.00

Amiback 2.0 Plus Tools Bundle $119.00

Info Nexus

$ 79.95 1

Anim Workshop

Special $ 49.00

Light Rave 3.1 tiearant

Art Department Pro 2.5

$259.00

Light Wave 3D 4.0

$1295.01)

ADPro: Epson Scanner '.

Driver $175.00

Magic Lantern II New

Prit .:- $ 79.95

Bars and Pipes Professional V2.5 $389.00

Map Studio (Vols 1-6 complete) $ 69.95 |

Brilliance V2

$ 99.00

Max on Magic

$ 69.00

Calagari 24

Special $249.00

Multilayer for ADPro VI .7

$139.00

CrossDOS 6.0

$ 69.95

Multilayer for ImageFX V1.7

$139.00

CrossMAC

New Price $CALL

Money Matters V3 New

Price $ 75.00

Cygnus Ed Pro V3.5

$109.00

Montage Postscript Module

$249.00

Datastore

$109.00

Morphus for Imagine Clearum

Deluxe Music V2

$ 99.00

Morph Plus

$175.00

Deluxe Paint V

$ 95.00

Organiser

$ 89.00

DICE 3.0

$199.00

OS 3.1 Kits Available rea

soon $CALL

DirWork2.1

$ 94.95

PC -Task 3.1

$119.00

Directory Opus V5

$119.00

PageStream 3.0h

$399.00

Disk Expander

New Price $ 49.95

Pegger V2 JPEG Utility New

Price $ 69.95

Distant Suns V5

$ 94.95

Pen Pal 1.5

$ 79.00

DTU lOQ 1 .0

$ 94.95

Personal Paint 6.3

$ 99.00

Easy Ledgers 2

New Price $299.00

Photogenic s VI .2

$139.00

Essence 11 / Forge

$139.00

Pixel 3D Pro V2.0

$289.00

Final Copy II Release 2

$119.00

Power Copy V3.03a

$ 39.95

Pinal Data Release 2

$129.00

SAS C/C++ V6

$299.00

Final Writer Release 4

$169.00

SCALA MM400

$399.00

GarneSmith

$189.00

Scenery Animator V4

$ 99.95

Gigamem3.12

$ 89.95

Sparks 2.173

$199,00

GPFax

$ 99.00

Studio II (Printer Drivers)

$ 99.00

Helm 1.66

$149.00

Superbase Personal 4

$189,00

HiSoft Basic 2.0

$149.00

Superbase Pro V 1 .3

$325.00

HiSoft DevPac 3

$139.00

Super Jam V 1.1

$159.00

HiSoft Pascal

$199.00

TV Paint Pro 2.0 Special !

Hollywood FX

$289.00

Typesmith V2.5

$199.00

Hollywood FX Lite

$ 79.95

Vista Pro 3

$ 99.95

Home Accounts 2

Clearance^ 29.00

Wordworth V3. 1 Release 2

$139.00

Humanoid (Lightwave)

$259.00

Wordworth Companion, (book

$ 49.00

Hypercache 2.0
ImageFXV2.1

$ 59.95
$399.00

GURU ROM V6

ST 35.00

This list is not exhaustive. Please phone for any titles not listed.

MAESTRO
MODEMS

Maestro external 28.8k Fax
Modems with GP Fax software.

• V.FC + Fax §399-

• V.34 + Fax S499-

SONY Quad-Speed
SCSI CD-ROMS

■ SONY CDU 76S
Internal 4x spin

"/FREE

J FRErQHT

\ .across Australia \

Vor orders ove^_f 100 \

-SONY CDU 76S
External 4x spin

*

MVB

Ample Free On-Site Parking

506 - 508

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BOM

FantaSeas

► While not specifically an Amiga ti-
tle, this is produced by Fred Fish's
.Amiga Library Services so we feel
obliged to give it a plug. FantaSeas is
a two-CD set containing the thick end
of 300 high quality underwater pho-
tographs in Photo CD format. Reefs,

wrecks, close-ups - if it's interesting
and underwater, it's probably on these
discs.

All of the photos are royalty free,
provided you don't print more than
5000 copies and you send a copy of
whatever you produce to the manufac-
turers.

You need a Photo CD compatible
drive (just about all of them) and ap-
propriate viewing software (plenty
around, although AsimCDFS's excel-
lent transparent conversion to IFF is
the best), and of course an AGA or 24
bit capable Amiga is a good idea if
you want to see the pictures in their
full glory.

Local distribution has yet to be an-
nounced; contact Amiga Library Ser-
vices on 0011 1 +602 491 0048 for
more information.

SX-1 Lives!

There's been a flurry of changes of
ownership and responsibility in the re-
cently-passed months of Amiga uncer-
tainty, and one of the many machina-
tions was the old manufacturers of the
SX-1 CD32 expansion box, Paravi-
sion, transferring the device to HiTech
Components. Paravision purchased
Microbotics, another Amiga expan-
sion manufacturer, around the same
time. The upshot of all this is that the
SX-1 is back in production. The fifth
production run was slated for shipping
in mid-August, but the quantities in-
volved are apparently small - by the
time you read this, it may be too late
to get in orders for this run, though of
course sufficient demand will encour-
age more production. Call your dealer
if you're interested.

New
FrozenFish out

I The latest edition of Fred Fish's
FrozenFish archive CD for all CD-
ROM capable computers has been
released, with 1100 compressed Fish
floppies and sundry other software
from the FreshFish update CDs.

Each Fish disk comes in its own
archive, and there's also 102 Mb of
animations and graphics utilities, 74
Mb of pictures, 16 Mb of games and
related material, and the CBM Native
Developer Update Kits V37, V39, &
V40 (except for the autodocs). Look
for a review soon!

Cloanfo PNG
Toolkit

I GIF is probably the most popular
image format in the world. It's small,
it's quick to display on fast machines,
and it stores 256 colour images, which
are good enough for most people. But
it also belongs to Unisys Corporation,
who are demanding royalties on the
GIF code, so anyone making GIF sav-
ing or loading programs has to pay a
slice. Huge controversy has been
sparked by the ongoing GIF saga, and
one of the upshots has been Portable
Network Graphics (PNG). This new
format is compressed and lossless,
like GIF, but can store 24 bit images
as well, and it's slowly gaining sup-
port around the world.

Cloanto, the makers of Personal
Paint, have a toolkit out containing a
PNG DaraType for OS3+ Amigas,
some information on the GIF contro-
versy, sample source code to use
DataTypes and an ARexx script for
Personal Paint to automatically find
GIFs and convert them to PNG.
There's also a deluxe version of the
toolkit with test files, full PNG specs,
documentation and more code, and
you can get it on the Cloanto Personal
Suite CD-ROM (soon to be available
in Australia - watch this space!).

You can get the regular version of
the PNG Toolkit free from Aminet.-
or you will be able to, anyway, when
Cloanto actually put it there. When it
becomes available, we'll make it
available to the Net-challenged. In the
meantime, feel free to call Cloanto
Italy on +39 432 545902.

CD32
set-top boxes!

» Think Video Interactive (TVI) is a
company headed by Duncan Fraser,
an ex-Commodore Canada employee.
The company is working on various

online projects, including software for
the CD32 to turn it into a cheap set-
top box that any online banking ser-
vice provider can use. It's these sorts
of projects that look like keeping the
CD32 alive, at least in some form.

8

AMIGA Review

5

MAVERICK AMIGA

UNITECH

ELECTRONICS PTY LTD T/as

ACN 003 864 042 Established 1 978

Celebrating 17 years in business!

The Home of Technology

NOT BORN TO WLE
BORN TO BE BEST-*

"WlAMIGA

TM

AMIGA DEVELOPER JZ

AMIGA REPAIRS ^

AMIGA SALES SERVICE & SUPPORT

SB Tummul Place, ST. ANDREWS. SYDNEY. N.S.W. 2566
ey. N.S.W. 2566. Dedicated 24 hours Fax: 02 603 8685
Trading Hours Sam to 5pm Monday to Friday. Sat Morning 9am to 12noon Mobile 018 466 928

Scsi To

200 watts
of pure grunt!
for A1200
etc

$220

H.58612 SCSI Tower (above) $220

|h.28612 20OWA120O $149

U.K. manufactured Joysticks
A full 12 month Australian Warranty

I Sureshot standard $39.95

Crusier Multi-Colour joystick $49.95

Cruiser Turbo Joystick , ...$49.95

Competition Pro 5000 Mini $45.95

Competition Pro 5000 Black $49.95

IOMEGA ZIP DRIVE 100MB
Pack of 3 X 100MB disks $115

WHITE HOT SPECIALS

Brilliance 2 $96

Broadcast Trtler $249

Pagestream 3.0 $CALL

Easy Ledgers $299

QUICKNET $CALL

CD32 Game Specials

TROLLS $49

MORPH $49

John Barnes Europe Football $49

HARDWARE

AMIGA A1200 Hard Drive Cables

C.01200 Dual HD Cable $39

C.01210 3.5"HD intnl Kit $51

C.01220 3.5"HD extnl K3t $54

C.01230 2.5" + 3.5" HD Kit. $59

C. 01 240 SX-1 xtnl 3.5" Kit $59

C.01250 SX-1 intnl 2.5" $31

C. 01260 2.5" 40mm cable $27

C.01270 3,5"(x2)xtnlkit, $65

C 75555 50F IDC x 7 SCSI con $39

C.04220 40W IDE H/D cable $19

C.03020 reverse 2.5" kit $65

Monitor Cables

C.00929 9M - 9 F Extension $29

C.23984 9F-23F 1084S $29

C.01509 9M-15DF $29

C.88184SCART/stereo $69

C.1506S 15DM ■ Video-6 BNC $29

C.92384 9M - 23F 1084S $29

C.02384 23F-RCA only $29

C.62384 6DIN-23F 1 084S $29

C.1521515DM-15DFXTN $35

C.15923 15DM-23F/L0GIC $69

C.1522315DM-23F.. $29

C.90003 9DMitsubishi-23F Logic $59

Monitor Adapters

A.0231S 23Fto 15 D with LOGIC $40

A.15023 23F to 15 F No Logic $35

A.02329 23F to 9 F with LOGIC $40

18 types of Monitor Sw/Box from $99

Tell us the configuration - we'll do the rest!

Analog Joystick Adapter

A.00159. PC to Amiga J/S $29

Printer cables

C. 35525 1.8metres $8

C.02536 5 metres $10

C.1 2536 10 metres.. .$18

C.20536 20metreS... $33

Extension cables

C.23223 23M-23F 1 .2M $19

C.25225 25M-25F1.2M $19

C.92525 modem 350mm .$13

C.25999 SX-1 modem $18

C62525 Pamet +Disk.3.M ...427

C.72525 Null modem 2.M .$21

SCSI-2 cables

C.52520 25MD-50Hi-D $68

C8G18S86SCSL86SCS1 S2SE

C.50050 5QMCen-50MCen $49

C.50750 50MHI-D -SOMCen $S9

SCSI (Std SCSI-1) cable

C.5Q925 50MCen-25MD $19

SCSI IDC Ribbon Cables

C.50S55 50 Fx2- 50MCen $19

C.55555 50FIDCX3 $17

C.50665 50 F IDC x 2 to 50 Cent ..$39

C.508B5 50 F Cent-50 IDC $39

25way. 34way. 40 way IDC's

C.1 2525 25 MD-25MD.Rib $39

C.4024Q 40 IDC-40 IDC X2 $22

C.34040 40IDC-40 IDCx3 $29

C.40340 34way IDC x 3 $20

C.12525 Vidi 12Extn Cable $36

IDE hard drives 3.5"

H.1 T428 IDE HD 428MB SCALL

H.11528 IDE HD 528MB $CALL

H.5a506 IDE HD 850MB SCALL

SCSI hard drives

H.22343 SCSI2 HD 343MB .5CALL

H.22456 SCS12 HD 455MB SCALL

H.33108 SCSI2 1.08GB SCALL

H.33321 SCSI2 2.1 GB .SCALL

EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE TO SUIT
A500 up to A2000 requires 1Mb RAM
PRICED FROM $24. A real bargain!

CD32 & Peripherals

J.32032 Competition Pro Joypad $49

J.00O32 FMV module (MPEG) SCALL

J.1 0032 SX-1 Module (a must!) $399

J.10132SX-1 AT Keyboard $49

J .90032 Communicator Lite $149

J.32222 CD32 Machine $CALL

CD32 Video Titles from $59

Andrew Lloyd Webber Collection, Black
Rain, Bryan Adams, BonJovi, David Bow-
ie, Coming to America, * "ish Called
Wanda, Ghost, Thp [_ g%f^ ^led Octo-
ber. Indecen* " CAJlnJ Xttraction,
Kate P-^ t(\\ &*&<'• 1 2, Patriot
Game *l \U*^=en Flix 1/2. Star
Trek V fe^^^iig Game, Sting, Sliver,
The Cui ., i ne Krays, Tina Turner Rio '88,
The Three Tenors, Tina Turner Simply the
Best, Top Gun, Wayne's World 1 & 2,
White Christmas. Many titles are arriving
weekly. Call to place your name on our
mail & phone info list - don t miss our/

CD32 Games - Heaps in stock!

CD32 Games From $39 to $129.95

Amiga Chips Also in stock SCALL

H.00003 Kickboard Plus 3 Ft/Sharer... ..$49

H.60000 1 Meg Exp A600..... $149

H.00512 1/2 Meg A500 Exp $79

H.12Q03 UK Speakers 2W $49

H.00132 CD32 Campatible mouse $39

H. 10880 Xtnl Floppy Drive $165

H.21760 Hi-Density xtnl F/Drive $289

H.91760 Hi-Oansity Intnl F/Drive $279

H.80880Teac880Klnt.Floppy $165

H.30030 30 W RMS Spkrs .$159

H.44425 4 way Data Sw/Box $45

H.SS336 Optical Mouse .$69

H.1 2002 A1200 real time clock $55

H.1 2024 Vidii-Pro-24 $495

H.00288 Maestro 28.8 modem $595

C.1 2000 A2000K/Bxtn cable $13

C,1 4000 A4D00K/Bxtn cable $13

Heaps of Software - too numerous to list!

3.1 ROM Kits in slock for A500, A600 HD (no more searching for 2.05 37.350) , A2000, A3000, A4000 (not A1200)

WE ARE THE EXCLUSIVE AUSTRALIAN DISTRIBUTOR OF THE COMPETITION PRO JOY PAD

CHIP LEVEL REPAIRS: ALL AMIGA REPAIRS ARE DONE ON OUR PREMISES - NO MIDDLE MAN!

A1200 DKB - COBRA or MONGOOSE! A1200 Memory RAM expansion boards. YES! $CALL.

Memory RAM Chips & SIMM RAM Moduies YES! $CALL

NOT LISTED? IF WHAT YOU WANT ISN'T HERE, WE'VE PROBABLY GOT IT - JUST GIVE US A CALL*
Cash - Bankcard - Visa - Mastercard (Min Purchase $40) - Money Orders - C.O.D's - Bank Cheque - Direct Deposit
We Courier Anywhere in the world. Prices do not include freight or insurance - CALL or DROP IN FOR A

Prices are correct at the time of going to press. E&OE UEPL/AC AR-9/95 „« Z„ oat-c Aatai r\nuct

UNITECH ELECTRONICS PTY LTD IS A REGISTERED AMIGA DEVELOPER '" Htt 1di ™« fc ^ A IALUUUZ!

ALSO SERVICING COMMODORE PRODUCTS SINCE 1983 REPAIRS / UPGRADES / MODIFICATIONS /DESIGN

Video van

C. Kelly of Oxenford, Qld, sent
a picture of a Nissan Urvan-
mo tinted video edit and processing
suite for Sports Channel Video on
the Gold Coast. As you ought to be
able to see form the picture, among
the monitors, VTRs and other
video hardware is an A 1200 and a
Neriki genlock, used to overlay ti-
tles and display messages to moni-
tors at sports venues all over the
coast.

Job lot

Dean Cocoran of Bathurst,
NSW, decided to save up his spot-
tings until he had a lot, which is
not the way to get a free sub since
people will beat you to it on the
older ones but since he seemed
happy to send us money for maga-

= ^ =. -^= = 5 g = = =

amiga'specialists

NEW & USED HARDWARE & SOFTWARE

BOUGHT. SOLD & TRADED

OVER 400. TITLES IN STOCK!

REPAIRS & UPGRADES

BOOKS, ACCESSORIES, PERIPHERM,S

HUGE PUBLIC DOMAIN LIBRARY

Amilar, 17B\t, Fish, TBAG, LSD, Assassins

3 Disk Catalogue $5

CD-ROM & CD32 TITLES

Mail Orders Welcome

AY1ITAR HOME COMPUTER SUPPLIES

1/36 GILLAM DRIVE, KELMSCOTT

WESTERN AUSTRALIA 61111

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zines we suppose that didn't matter
to him. He spotted an Amiga on
Prime News on the 19th of June,
during one of those worthy and
completely accurate stories on
child porn on the Internet, with a
late model Deluxe Paint being
used to show unsavoury pictures.

In the very very bad movie
Highlander m (he didn't actually
say the very very bad bit but we
feel compelled to warn anyone
other there who might waste mon-
ey on video rental) what looked
like Scala on what might have
been a 1084S monitor was being
used for some sort of irrelevant
computerey purpose in between
plotless swordfights.

At a Mitchell University
booze-up with a nominal beach
party theme, he observed a surfing
simulator in which you stand on a
surfboard and by swaying make a
guy on screen do snow boarding
(Perfectly logical. Shut up). It tran-
spired that this system was based
on a CD32 - though Dean didn't
think it did it justice.

The incredibly hip and happen-
ing Bianca Video Disco, no doubt
the epicentre of the Central West
rave scene, uses an A500 with gen-
lock to put titles on their videos,
run occasional live messages on
the disco screens and also put ani-
mations, Amiga logos and occa-
sional unintentional Workbench
screens behind videoless tunes.

Dodgy movie

Jeff Sereno, of Dural, NSW
was watching the movie "Wild
Justice" on the 15th of July on
Channel 7, and spotted an A1500
near the end being used as a "tar-
getting" computer, tracking a boat
for destruction. In a leap of im-
plausibility worthy of SeaQuest
DSV (another Roy Scheider vehi-
cle), the targetting system was an
old version of Deluxe Paint, the
crosshair pointer with the area-to-
mag nify box around it was moving

across a "Rather tacky" world map,
and jumping to magnify mode des-
ignated the target. Uh huh.

Hands across the ocean...

Gary J McSweeney of As-
pendale, Melbourne, spotted an
A 1200, late model 1084S, Star-
blazer joystick and Golden Image
mouse in a local paper item about
two kids hailing from near Cher-
nobyl staying with a Melbourne
family, who'd discovered that
alien blasting is a universal lan-
guage.

Educational applications

Paul Morabito of Cabramatta,
NSW, spotted an A4000 on the
cover of About Catholic Schools, a
no doubt riveting magazine dis-
tributed to all students in the ap-
propriate institutions. He sent us
the cover, and also mentioned his
tender years and deep poverty and
need to get his disk back - but
we'd lost the disk, so we sent him
a spare game we had sitting about,
which even if rubbish has a few
disks in it. Seemed fair.

Continued on page 72.

10

AMIGA Review

AM

More hot

AMIGA

a

news

By Daniel Rutter

I Yes, fellow Amiga users, there's
more news on Amiga Technolo-
gies and their plans for the Amiga.
US Amiga dealers attended a
meeting on the 21st of July with
Amiga Technologies to discuss
pricing, distribution and the like,
and almost a month later there was
a press conference in the V K, cov-
ering the same topics as the US
meeting and more.

Some statements made at the
US meeting were contradicted at
the UK one; since the UK meeting
was held later and was an official
press briefing, we think it carries
more weight. I suspect the ideas
floated at the US dealer meeting
were intended to test the water
(which turned out to be pretty cold,
for a couple of the proposals!), and
the statements at the press confer-
ence are the final policies.

How much?

The question on everyone's
lips at the US meeting was what
the A4000T would end up selling
for. There was a huge furore when
CEI in the States recently an-
nounced that base-spec A4000T's
would retail for $US35O0, an an-

nouncement based on an unofficial
Amiga Technologies price (if you
believe most commentators) or
CEI's own imagination (if you be-
lieve Amiga Technologies).

In any case, that stratospheric
price has been reduced somewhat,
with US-made A4000T's with
6Mb of RAM, a 500Mb or better
hard drive and the standard
25MHz 68040 processor expected
to retail for less than $US3000 -
the figure SUS2700 has been men-
tioned. The price is based on a flat
wholesale dealer price from Amiga
Technologies, which has not been
revealed to the public. The ma-
chines have been promised to be
available at the start of September.

Less than $3000 is still expen-
sive. Remember, PCs are cheaper
in the States than here; even for
$US32O0 (a plausible price with &
decent monitor) you can still get a
PC clone with much more impres-
sive paper statistics than the
A4000, but Amiga Technologies is
obviously not trying to compete
with PCs in the States.

Why obviously? Glad you
asked. The A4000 will be dis-
tributed in the States to dealers that

want it, but the A1200 won't. This
doesn't mean no 1200s will make
it to the USA - there's nothing
stopping dealers importing their
own 1200s from Europe except the
irritation of different voltages - but
as far as Amiga Technologies are
concerned there's no point trying
to push the 1200, or any other
Amiga, in the States yet,

If you need any other proof, the
ad budget provides it. Amiga
Technologies' US advertising bud-
get is a grand total of no dollars,
no cents. They're taking out no ads
at all.

Before you panic, this does not
mean there won't be any ads in
Europe. While the UK press con-
ference didn't go into the subject
of promotions, we can safely as-
sume that Amiga Technologies is
happy, for the time being at least,
to sell tons of consumer-level
Amigas to the rabid European mar-
ket through ESCOM's chain stores
and other retailers; as far as they're
concerned, people in Europe al-
ready have and want Amigas,
whereas the American market is a
few video users, a reasonable num-
ber of vocal Amigans scattered

AMIGA Review

11

A

across the country and well over
100 million people who wouldn't
take Amigas if they came free with
a ballpark hot dog.

If this is true, the Amiga Tech-
nologies strategy will certainly
maintain the status quo, as no-
body's likely to buy an Amiga if
they don't know they exist. But
many would-be 1200 sellers in the
US say there are plenty of people
who'd like an AGA Amiga but
can't afford a 4000.

According to the US meeting,
the "no 1200s for America" deal
was to be inverted in Europe, with
only 1200s being distributed there.
The UK conference contradicted
this, though, which suggests a sud-
den awakening on Amiga Tech-
nologies' part to the demand for
power Amigas worldwide.

The A1200s are being made
near Bordeaux in France by an
American company called Solec-
tron, which makes all sorts of
high-tech gear including Silicon
Graphics workstations. Amiga
Technologies say they've picked
European manufacturing to avoid
any quality problems - it's no se-
cret that in the year or so before
Commodore's demise the number
of defective Amigas was high.

The UK A1 200

The entry level A1200 for the
UK, available at the end of

Right: The CD32 - dead
and buried?

September, will have 2Mb of
RAM, bundled productivity and
games software and no hard drive,
and a £399 price tag. For £100
more you'll get a 170Mb hard
drive and Scala MM300 multime-
dia software.

Contradicting the US confer-
ence again, John Smith went on to
mention an A4000/040 pack with a
1Gb drive and 6Mb of RAM, and a
4000/060 package out sometime
during November. All of the new
Amiga packages will ship with
AmigaDOS 3.1; 1200s will be
made in Bordeaux, A4000 hoards
will he made near Philadelphia and
assembled there or, for European
4000s, in the ESCOM plant in
Germany.

There's also going to be a new
European-made monitor, which
will work with all Amiga screen-
modes - 15 to 38kHz. Called the
M1438S, this appears to be a re-
badged Microvitec model.

RIP CD32?

Going by the earlier US meet-
ing, the CD32 seemed to be dead
and buried, with Amiga Technolo-

gies apparently of the opinion that
going up against the might of
Sony's Playstation and the other
recent superpowered consoles -
Sega's Saturn, even 3DO - with
the CD32 was a bad idea. The
CD32 was mentioned only in pass-
ing at the UK conference, but it
was mentioned that they'd be on
show at the upcoming IFA Fair in
Berlin, which sounds like a funny
way to dump a product.

Even if it's not going to be
made any more, this doesn't mean
the CD32's completely dead. De-
velopers are still making games for
it, with an SX-1 expansion it turns
into a funny looking but perfectly
functional A 1200 plus CD-ROM,
and Amiga Technologies' enthusi-
asm for niche markets and technol-
ogy licensing means CD32 boards
may still be made for use in things
like information kiosks, set-top
boxes and the like.

If the CD32 is to be scrapped,
there's some sense to the decision.
The CD32 may be expandable into
a proper computer, hut it looks like
a games console, A pile of cool
feamres are as nothing if you're
selling to a market that wants to
play games, full stop, not compute
and watch MPEG movies. The
CD32 also can't match (he pro-
cessing power of the cutting edge

i

Left: The "new"
A4000 - back to the old
cases?

AMIGA Review

THE

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Version 4.0 Surfacing

• Dozens ot surface attributes including
Luminosity, Glossiness.Qiffusion,
Transparency, Reflectivity, Dumpiness

• Animate and morph textures

• Multiple surfaces per object

• Apply any of aver a dozen textures including
Marble, Wood, Ripples, Fractal patterns and
a variety of image mapping options

Version 4.0 Rendering

• Render 32-bit Images in custom resolutions

Use realistic camera options such as fatal
Length, Depth of Field sod Motion Blur

Generate true-to life ray traced shadows,
reflections, and retraction
Control light attributes including Light Type,
Colour, Intensity, Falloff, Lens Flare, Shadow
options and more

Create special effects such as animated Peg,
Image Keying and Particle Blur

Lightwave supports multiple image formats

Version 4.0 Animation

Easy la ose keyframe-eased animation system

Use Inverse Kinematics and Bines lor

realistic character animation

• Hierarchical motion and Targeting

• Displacement Mapping and 3D Marphing

• Advanced motion features such as Spline
Controls, Velocity, Shifting and Scaling

Version 4.0 Plug-In Architecture

• Allows lor additional ieatures such as
Gravity, Particle Systems, new Surfaces,
Image Processing and mech more.

• Compatible with DPS Personal Animation
Recorder and Macro Systems Utah motion
digila! video cards.

SpecificaHttia ittftferl to change without mSct, PtntScript is a trodmart
of Adobe Systems. Inr. ^gArtraw 10 ism trademark afNewTd. lac.
Aim$t> is a tratlemrl. t>f CumTanJf.rc-Ainiga . ItX KGl is a tntotrnark of
Silicon Crapftin foe &fiwTei ini . I MJ.
ZVtjsis. /"<-.<■ i'V.v -i:.'' iw. Biw/m dud E > k Wtotti, Swbxt, A.u.trriiliii

ii 1 1 i M e d i a Technologies • Distributed by S i g in a c o m (02) 5 2 4 9846

dedicated games machines. It can
sell cheaper than Saturn and 3 DO,
but at that price it's not much of a
computer, just a console with two
year old technology.

We await an official pro-
nouncement on the fate of the
CD32 as we know it.

Rhubarb!

We went to all the trouble of
presenting you with a load of pic-
tures of "The New Amiga" in the
July 1995 magazine, and now it
appears that the machines that'll be
hitting the streets as you read this
will be in pretty much the original
cases, at least for this year. And
the red four-bars logo Amiga
Technologies put all over the box-
es has been scrapped (it reportedly
looks too much like the Church of
Scientology insignia), and replaced
with the word Amiga set in the
font Bodoni with a red square over
the i. We haven't seen any pictures
of the "real" A4000T or new
A1200 yet, so who knows what
we'll end up seeing. And who
cares, for that matter? It'll be a
bummer if Amigas end up looking
like PCs (worst case scenario!), but
it's what's on the screen that mat-
ters.

Distribution

UK Amiga distribution will be

split between chain stores and in-
dependent dealers. ESCOM's
many stores in the UK (they took
over the Rumbelows chain, which
used to sell Amigas) and other dis-
tributors will be involved.

The UK branch of Amiga
Technologies is also responsible
for sales to India, Malta, Israel -
and Australia. It's not a local dis-
tributor, but it's the next best thing.

Petro speaks

Petro Tyschtschenko, the Gen-
eral Manager of Amiga Technolo-
gies name, talked about the diffi-
culties encountered in getting the
corpse of Commodore up and
walking - $US10 million to buy it,
and several times as much to get it
going again, with long lead times
on many parts and tailor made
parts more expensive than in the
olden days of a year and a half
ago.

According to Petro, the first
runs of A 1200s and A4000Ts will
have essentially the same specifi-
cations as the old models - maybe
bigger drives, maybe different
looks, definitely AmigaDOS 3.1
for the A 1200, but essentially the
same. He said that the A4000T
was a new product anyway, since
Commodore only made 200 units
(does that make de Loreans new
cars?), and specifically ruled out

Left: The new I Glasses
Amiga compatible

any case changes this year.

Interestingly, Tyschtschenko
mentioned that while Amiga Tech-
nologies already has a dealer net-
work in the US, they're still look-
ing for a partner/distributor to han-
dle business over there.

He didn't make any dramatic
statements about future Amigas -
faster processors and chip integra-
tion (combining presently separate
chips, for simpler, smaller, cheaper
boards) for the current machines,
external CD-ROMs and more built
in RAM for A1200s and CD32
boards in set-top boxes were all
developments he said Amiga Tech-
nologies were working on, but he
mentioned no schedules.

The next generation RISC
Amiga is still at the pre-drawing-
board stage - there's been no deci-
sion on which processor to use.

VR glasses!

John Smith, the UK Sales Man-
ager for Amiga Technologies and
the guy who compensates for the
complexity of Petro

Tysehtschenko's name, spoke at
the UK press conference and men-
tioned something rather interesting
- virtual reality glasses, called I
Glasses.

While not actually an Amiga
Technologies product - they're
made by Virtual Products, another
ESCOM group member - 1 Glasses
will work with Amiga machines.
They come in two models. The
first, which lacks ail the fancy
head-tracking gear but can still dis-
play 3-D images, will work with
anything with a composite video
out - A 1200s, CD32s, other game
consoles, VCRs and so on. They
give you what's billed as an appar-

AMIGA Review

A

ent two metre screen - what the
resolution's like remains to be
seen, but it sounds rather cool.

3D films for I Glasses are ap-
parently in tbe works, Smith men-
tioned the Who's "Tommy" as an
example. The PC version of the I ,
Glasses has surround sound, and
head tracking, so you see what you
look at, not one fixed view. It's al-
so considerably more expensive,
because on top of head tracking it
has to use a VGA to composite
converter box. No prices have yet
been announced for either, though.

Both I Glass models weigh in
at about 230 grams; certainly more
noticeable than an ordinary pair of
specs, but not much to strap to
your head. They're touted as being
designed with spectacle wearers in
mind, which is more than can be
said for previous attempts. Both
models should be out in the UK
during September, with the PC
version coming complete with
some sample games.

Commodore PCs

The first "Commodore" badged
PCs, made by ESCOM, are due to
hit the European market shortly.
There's nothing very special about
these machines; they'll carry the
Commodore brand, there will be
Commodore branded accessories
and peripherals as well, and
they're aimed at the bargain-name-
brand market.

Further up the market ladder
will be the Commodore "Golf se-
ries PCs, better made and with
funky cases by Frogdesign, the
folk responsible for the case-that-
until-recently-looked-likely-to -be-
used-for-the-A4000T.

Overall

If the current Amiga Technolo-
gies strategies stay, the Amiga
market in the USA will wither -
and it's none too healthy now. Eu-
rope, however, should be a bonan-
za, with 1200s selling by the truck-

load thanks to existing support and
advertising (none of which we've
seen at the time of writing, but
have faith). There's still no local
distributor for Australia, but with
Amiga Technologies UK in charge
^of getting machines to us at least
we know who to talk to now.

Amiga Technologies have a
plan. It's not necessarily a great
plan, yet, but they have no record
of pigheadedness in the face of
public outcry - in fact, quite the
opposite, if that's how you read the
SUS35O0 A4000 and 1200/4000
comparative distribution changes.
They are the Amiga's best, and on-
ly, chance, and they seem to be
getting their act together.

Stop Press!
Nothing to report!

We were hoping to be able to
bring you news of an official Aus-
tralian Amiga distributor this issue,
but unfortunately nobody's been
announced. As previously men-
tioned, Amiga Technologies UK is
handling distribution TO Australia,
but there's nobody (yet) handling
distribution IN this country.

This isn't all that astonishing.
In the olden days of CBM, persons
from overseas accasionally ex-
pressed surprise that Australia rat-
ed a whole Commodore branch to
iself, rather than just a simple little
distribution office. We may have
very high computer ownership in
Australia, but that doesn't make us
a huge market - we're a drop in the
bucket compared with Germany.

So it's conceivable that there
won't actually be a local Amiga
company, per se, just distribution
deals with various retailers. This
wouldn't be a problem for distribu-
tion purposes, but Amiga Tech-
nologies would also have to make
local advertising deals without a
local representative, so some sort
of Australian division could still be
an idea. Time will tell.

Amigas on show

Amiga Technologies will have
a booth at the Internationale
Funkausstellung (IFA) in Berlin,
one of Germany's biggest TV,
communications and multimedia
fairs with 500,000 visitors expect-
ed. This will be the first official
public Amiga showing since the
liquidation; 1200s, 4000Ts, CD32s
and I Glasses will be on show.

If you want to contact Amiga
Technologies UK, responsible for
Australian Amiga distribution,
you can call on ±44 1628 7700 25
(there are two other numbers, the
same but ending in 36 and 41), or
fax them on +44 162S 7700 22.

a

Other news

NewTek, according to Alex
Amor of CEl, is going to stop
production of the Video Toaster,
the core of the professional
Amiga market in the USA. The
reason? Shortage of parts (eh?):
apparently CEI is trying to
change NewTek's mind about
this.

Part of the reason for
NewTek ditching the Toaster
could be Centaur Development,
the Opalvision people, finally an-
nouncing that the long, long,
long, long, long awaited Opal
Video Roaster chip is com-
pletely, totally and utterly ready,
though not actually shipping,
pending A4000T price announce-
ments. People who sent Opal
boards and. money to the USA for
Roaster installation and got less
than they bargained for may now
shout "Yeah, right! "

Hey, maybe it's true, and

maybs

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illge

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Amiga

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AMIGA Review

15

:h*mtions

Surfing

By Adrian De Luca

I The Internet, a practically infinite
resource of information, still con-
tinues to defy all predictions of its
growth rate, with an estimated
4,851,873 host computers connect-
ed to it, compared with only
2,476,641 at the same time last
year. Researchers believe the Inter-
net is growing by 24% per quarter.
What does all this mean, I hear you
ask?

Well, a whole lot more Amiga
Web pages to surf through of
course - according to these statis-
tics, the number of World Wide
Web pages doubles every 57 days!

The Amiga has always enjoyed
much support on the Internet - just
look at Aminet, the largest Amiga
software repository in the world,
which now boasts over 10,000 ac-
cesses by Amiga users every day.

And since the sale of the
Amiga to Escom, WWW pages in
support of the Commodore buyout
have been popping up everywhere.

These cover all aspects of the
takeover and make available all the

juicy information - transcripts of
press conferences, rumours, pic-
tures and user opinions.

If you've not already guessed, I
spend a lot of my free time (and
non-free time) surfing the informa-
tion rollercoaster and searching for
the latest and greatest Amiga stop-
ping points available on the net.

Over the past few weeks, I've
compiled a list of WWW sites
which every new Amiga Internet
surfer should check out.

The Amiga Home Page

http: ft ww w. omnipresenc e .
com/amiga.html

The home of the Amiga on the
Internet. The Amiga Home Page
provides a jumping off point for an
abundance of information on our
lovable machine.

You can find things like de-
tailed descriptions of the Amiga
hardware, a complete history of
how the Amiga was born, the low-
down on all the latest software
releases, examples of the Amiga at
work (SeaQuest, Babylon 5), links
to all the greatest software
archives, links to plenty of Amiga

16

AMIGA Review

A\

supporting companies, Amiga re-
lated user groups, newsletters and
BBS's all around the world, and
mbre!

Ami net

http; //ftp . wustl.edu/- aminet

No Amigoid can go past the
greatest Amiga Internet phe-
nomenon ever, Aminet!

Most if not all new Amiga
freely distributable software makes
its first stop at Aminet, the largest
Amiga software repository in the
world.

Aminet holds better than three
and a half gigabytes of software,
and it's very neatly organised into
categories so you won't have a
hard time finding what you're af-
ter.

If you get stuck, there's an ex-
cellent search facility to query its
large database of files. Aminet's
RECENT page is updated every
week with all the latest uploads,
and you can even have your own
personal new uploads page that
simply tells you what's new since
you last looked.

For all the latest in shareware,
Aminet is your one stop shop!

The Amiga Web Directory

httpL//www.prairienet/org/
community/clubs/cycug/amiga.html

This is a comprehensive guide
to Amiga resources on the Internet
and can be directly compared to
The Amiga Home Page. It's run by

■

.

AMIGA Review

17

.DONS

Spirit

Ml

the Urban a Commodore Users
Group in Mexico, and is constantly
updated with all the latest ESCOM
news and links to all the new
Amiga Web sites popping up on
the net.

The Amiga Web Directory
covers almost every aspect of the
Amiga - online magazines, ES-
COM press conference transcripts,
retailers and developers, frequently
asked questions (FAQs), latest
hardware reviews, links to major
software archives, Amiga news-
groups, telnet to Internet bulletin
boards and links to the more exotic
Amiga Web pages on the net.

If you ever need to find any-
thing about hardware, software, re-
tailers or developers, this site will
point you in the right direction.

Amiga Mosaic

http; //www. omnipresence .
com/amosaic/2.0/

Amiga Mosaic, the one and on-
ly World Wide Web browser
available for the Amiga, has an
amazing site fdled with everything
you need to know about the soft-
ware, from general discussion
groups through to snazzy screen-
shots.

Amiga Mosaic is currently in
version 2.0, Beta 1, and has been
dramatically upgraded from previ-
ous releases.

It now boasts a much easier to
use interface, support for forms,
background masking and an im-
proved hotlist; it's a more robust
and reliable program all round. I
have used 2.0 for these reviews,
and found it to be much more sta-
ble than previous releases.

I believe it could now finally
begin to compete with the PC's
NetScape!

This page contains complete

installation instructions, access to
the software archive, access to
copies of the AMosaic Digest
Newsletter, full details to join the
mailing lists, a list of developers
and comprehensive FAQs.

NEWTek

http : //www. newtek. com

Newtek have a Web site too,
supporting their Video Toaster
video boards and their ever popu-
lar ray tracing software, Light-
Wave. There's example images,
update and third party software
and complete US price lists.

Scala

http ://w w w/scala. com/
seal a/Welc ome . html

For all you multimedia buffs,
SCALA have only recently set up
a WWW Home Page providing
lots of information on their popular
products.

SCALA have a whole heap of
data on their Multimedia, In-
foChannel and Interactive TV soft-
ware lines. The page also contains
news, press releases, and a thor-
ough and probably not interesting
corporate background.

Although this page is not as
spectacular as I would have
thought, I'll be curious to see what
SCALA come up with in the fol-
lowing months.

If you're after a peek at the lat-
est multimedia software, or are
thinking of upgrading your exist-
ing package, pay SCALA 's home
page a visit.

Amiga Report
Online Magazine

http : //ramiga.cts . com :
80/amigareport/

Over the last couple of months
there's been an explosion of elec-
tronic Amiga magazines floating
around on the net for techies, hard
core gamers, CD32 users and ordi-
nary users, but none is more suc-
cessful than Amiga Report.

Amiga Report has been provid-
ing up-to-the-minute information
on the Commodore buyout pro-
cess, with transcripts of everything
that was said at the Commodore
auction and the ESCOM press con-
ferences. Now that the saga is
over, Amiga Report continues to
provide the latest news to the
Amiga community.

Amiga Report is put together
by a very serious bunch of young
journalists from the U.S. and
Canada, and it contains hardware
and software reviews, FTP an-
nouncements, latest ESCOM news
and occasionally the transcripts of
any special IRC conferences held
on #amiga channel.

The page contains all the back
issues, and details on how you can
get onto the Amiga Report mailing

AMIGA Review

AM

Workbench Serwr*

list and have the magazine sent to
you automatically.

Amiga Mailing Lists

http://www.iam.com/amtga/
lists.html

If you really want to keep tabs
on all the latest information on
new products or services and can't
be bothered searching for the info
yourself, then subscribe to mailing
lists and let the information come
to you!

This site contains details of
mailing lists of some popular hard-
ware and software products and
services like Aminet, Parnet, Imag-
ine, Linux, AmiTCP, Blitz Basic,
AMOS, PGP and heaps more!

The author of this site also pro-
vides some precautionary tips on
mailing lists for beginners. Unfor-
tunately, you can't automatically
subscribe to the mailing lists, but
there are all the necessary details
on how to do it.

Catch all my favourite Amiga
sites on my own Amiga Home
Page;

http : //yal lara. cs . rmit.edu .
au/~s9407327/ AmigaPage.html

Happy webbing!

Norltbench Screen

SOAIA Computer TeleFisitm US Home Page

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AM/GA Review

19

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Soapbox time

I am writing regarding the future
of Arnigas in this country and the rest
of the world. While it's comforting to
see a buyer after alf this time, the plat-
form is still very unstable. You will
not see the computer in any depart-
ment store or even any major comput-
er store.

If the A1200 is to survive, it must
have the following as minimum spec:
MC68LC030/28 or 33 MHz, 4Mb
RAM, 420 Mb HDD, 3.5" HD FDD at
the same price as before, since the
market is quite different now. ES-
COM must learn to utilise the market
forces of the IBM by using 3.5" HD-
Ds (remember, 420 and 540 Mb HDD
are cheaper to make than 200 or even
250Mb, since the 540 etc. are made in
much larger quantities.) The A1200
should be designed to take on 3.5"
HDDs (it only needs a small modifica-
tion). Today, you can get yourself a
high powered tBM for less than
$2000.

What annoys me is people who
keep saying that 2Mb is enough and a
100Mb HDD is enough. Remember,
the Amiga is a graphics computer
from the word go. It therefore requires
more memory to accommodate the
various graphic screens available. Just
because the OS is efficient, this does
not mean that we should, therefore, be
left with half the RAM and one fifth
the hard drive space of our IBM coun-
terparts.

Running Workbench on 1 or 2Mb
RAM is like trying to run Windows
on 2 or 4Mb. It works, but it is not ful-
ly utilising the capabilities of the sys-
tem. The A1200 should have at least

the LC version of the 030 so we can
use virtual memory (which is a good
thing since when you need the extra
ram, you don't have to go out and buy
more. These situations are not com-
mon but it is for convenience).

My suggestion is to stop fighting
the IBM market and co-operate by try-
ing to use as much as possible. Prices
for Amiga peripherals are ridiculous
in Australia.

Remember, this is 1995 and by the
time the Amiga gets going, Windows
95 will be moving the PC forward at a
much faster pace than before and the
Amiga will really be struggling.

Finally, the decision by Escom to
scrap the CD 3 2 makes good economic
sense since the console market is be-
ing choked with new consoles. If the
CD32 had been supported earlier, it
may have been saved. I've been trying
to sell mine for six months now and I
can't sell it (last time I had it up for
$150 but no one called!). Fortunately I
have found a use for the machine as a
portable cd player. The specs are not
up to standard today and the market
can not support any more consoles.
This is a pity, since it was the only
console to be fully expandable into a
real computer with small cost. Other
consoles can not do this (the CD32 is
the only console to be able to be con-
nected to the Internet, word process,
do 3D rendering, databases, program-
ming, etc.). I could go one for ever,
but I think most people know what
I'm talking about.

If you are unsure of the above, ask
yourself this question: Why has the
Amiga failed in Australia, and what
will stop it from being a major market
contender? (apart from Commodore's
collapse).

Darrin Hawkes, via Internet

Ed: Running a 68LC030 in the
A 1200 is an absolutely excellent plan
with only two minor flaws. One, there
is no such processor as an LC030,
and never has been, and two, there is

no such processor as an LC030, and
never has been. I know that strictly
speaking that's only one flaw, but I
thought it was such a biggie that it
merited mentioning twice.

You're no doubt thinking of the
LC040, which in a full 040 sans co-
processor but with MMU. The only
030 variants are the full version with
MMU, which is probably what you
meant, and the 68EC030, without the
MMU. Amiga Technologies have spe-
cifically referred to faster processors
in older machines as a near-future
plan, so it seems likely.

Your views on the Amiga's niche
make sense, but Amiga Technologies
seem not to be taking the bargain
price tack, yet. It's cost ESCOM a
bundle to get Arnigas into production
again, parts cost more than they did
two years ago and and Amiga Tech-
nologies are obviously loath to use the
first run of Arnigas as loss leaders.
They're pricing Arnigas for profit,
which means they're above what they
cost when Commodore went down and
don't have the same edge on bargain
basement PCs. But the European mar-
ket will buy them anyway, and it's
quite reasonable to expect significant
price drops when production ramps
up and the wheels get oiled again.

I can 't help but say that far and
away the most prominent reason for
any Amiga "failure" in Australia (by
what definition?) is the collapse of
Commodore. Let's face it, it's not
much of a spiel - "Come and buy this
cool computer that nobody's making
and a company went broke selling!
No, really, I know how it sounds... "

Thank goodness THOSE days are
over.'

Controversy, controversy!

As a person who has been in-
volved in the promotion of the Amiga
in education since the Amiga first ar-
rived in Australia, first as a dealer and
lately as a consultant, 1 have been in-
creasingly disturbed by the tenor of

20

AMIGA Review

^'i.

some of your reviews of education
product over the past few months. I
refer in particular to the Laseelles edu-
cational software review (Tom
Williams) in the Educate column of
the April 1995 Amiga Review, and
The Australian Graphic Encyclopedia
review (Daniel Rutter) in the June
1995 issue, and the letter reply to HC
Software the month after.

My personal experience with all
Laseelles education software (includ-
ing the four titles reviewed which, in-
cidentally, are not "new"; hence some
will not work on Workbench 2 or
higher) and with HC Software's The
Australian Graphic Atlas (and its
CD32 version, The Australian Graph-
ic Encyclopedia), puts me at odds
with both these reviewers.

Kids love these products, and so
do the teachers. Why? Because, unlike
so much so-called "education soft-
ware" that has been written for the
Amiga, it is written for the Australian
education system. For anyone with a
CD32 (or CDTV), I highly recom-
mend The Australian Graphic Ency-
clopedia. At last we have a geographic
resource for the Amiga that was previ-
ously only available for the Macintosh
and PC. And for anyone with pre-
school and primary school children, I
really do recommend Laseelles' edu-
cational software. It was good value
when it was selling for around $50 to
$80, and it is even better value at the
prices quoted in your review.

The thing that really concerned
me, however, was the impression Tom
Williams gave in his conclusion; that
commercial products are unnecessary
if PD or Shareware software is
available. How wrong he is. Sure, it's
great to have educational PD material,
but so much of it is unsuitable for
Australia. If the Amiga's position is to
be sustained here in the education
area, teachers want software that is
suitable for Australian schools, and
they want to know that they are deal-
ing with someone who has an ongoing
commitment to the software they are

being asked to buy. In other words,
they want local publishers - people
like Rush, Laseelles and HC Software.

The Amiga needs all the help it
can get in its bid to regain market
share, especially in education. In view
of this, may I suggest that, if your re-
viewers - for whatever reason - decide
not to give any product a favourable
review, it would be kinder to the
Amiga, to the Amiga community, and
ultimately, to Amiga Review, not to
review that product.

And while I have no quarrel with
your reply to Paul Johnson, namely
that: "We at Amiga Review do not be-
lieve in being unusually kind to soft-
ware because it was written in Aus-
tralia ...", I do feel that here is a situa-
tion where we have cause to apply the
apostle Paul's words at 1 Corinthians
6:12 - "All things are lawful for me;
but not all things are advantageous."

In the current Amiga climate, with
few Australian schools now using the
Amiga, and no State Education De-
partment supporting it, the last thing
we need is to discourage developers of
Amiga product, especially education
product.

If HC Software, and other local
publishers, had the resources of Bill
Gates, or even the backing of the
NSW Board of Studies (as Apple
does), perhaps they could produce
something fancier, and more to the
liking of Tom Williams or Daniel Rut-
ter. But let us be thankful that there
are still people like Paul Johnson, who
are prepared to publish educational
software for the Amiga. Because those
committed to selling Amigas, rather
than magazines, realise only too well
that, without commercial publishers
like HC Software, Laseelles and Rush,
there would be no Amiga in the edu-
cation market.

Basil Flinter, Armidale NSW

Ed: To address your points in or-
der: Just because software is old
doesn't mean it's OK for it not to

work on later versions of the operat-
ing system. In the majority of cases,
software written to Commodore spec
which worked with Workbench 1.3
still works today with 3.1. Antiquity is
no excuse.

With regard to ongoing commit-
ments to software, we await with in-
terest any new productions from Las-
eelles (who have apparently not
released anything since Workbench
1.3 was the state of the art - we're
ready to be corrected on this point),
and an update to the Australian
Graphic Encyclopedia which corrects
the many errors, removes the ridicu-
lous loading delays and adds suffi-
cient hypertext links to make the pack-
age easier to use than a book.

Also, we take exception to your
opinion that Amiga Review shouldn 't
run uncomplimentary reviews of prod-
ucts. Our job is not just promoting
Amigas, full stop. We like the ma-
chines. We use them. This does not
mean we should hush up everything
wrong with them and their software.

If we have two reviews to run in
the magazine and only room for one,
we '11 generally run the review of the
better product, and hold over the oth-
er review for the next magazine. But if
there's no such pressure, and there
seldom is, we feel the public have a
right to know what's bad as well as
what's good. We try, as much as we
can, to tell the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth, and keeping
mum about dud software is not telling
the whole truth.

We do not believe that Tom
Williams meant to imply "that com-
mercial products are unnecessary if
PD or Shareware software is
available" when he said "I was very
disappointed with this range of educa-
tional software.

The quality of the software is not
much better than most of the PD edu-
cation software around. "

Continued on page 73 . . .

AMIGA Review

21

Opal hassles

I recently bought a second hand
OpalVision board and already have
one BIG problem, I have an
A2000, 6.3 motherboard, A2091
with 2Mb, GVP SCSI controller
with 4Mb and Workbench 2.

The board is causing random
gurus at different parts of the start-
up, saying that different commands
and partitions have failed, or just
freezing the screen with a tearing
effect on the top half. When the
board is out everything works fine.

The manual says to consult a
technician; I have contacted some
and they said "it needs 2Mb of
chip RAM" or "Check your moth-
erboard for any dry joints," The
manual says the Opal board will
run on 1Mb chip RAM - what can
I do to get it working correctly?

I've been told that the 3.1
ROM chip eliminates the 1Mb
chip barrier and uses all the
memory as one, and also improves
compatibility with graphic boards.
Is this true?

I also have a high density drive
that doesn't quite work. When in-
serting a disk, it takes a long time
to recognise it, and it can't ini-
tialise a disk when I try to format
it. Is this something to do with the
DOSDrivers? I know a few other
people with the same problem.

Ms S Muhling, Mackay, Qld

Dr Help; Ah, I know these
symptoms well. Bizarre failures,
nonsense errors; yup, there's

something broken there. I can
make this very machine I'm typing
on do it by blocking its ventilation
for a few hours, as I discovered the
other day.

Try the Opal board in another
machine, if you can; if it works,
then indeed your machine does
have a problem - although expan-
sion bus problems could be expect-
ed to mess up the other two cards
as well. If as I suspect, It screws
up in other machines too, get if
fixed - and not by the guy who
said, incorrectly, that it needs 2Mb
of chip RAM to work!

Try Unitech Electronics on
(02) 820 3555 or Subnet on (02)
417 7600, if as I also suspect no-
body up North wants to touch it.

The 3.1 ROM and Workbench
indeed work better with graphic
boards, but they do not unify your
RAM into one lump. You still have
chip and fast, and never the twain
shall meet. For more on Work-
bench 3.1, check out the articles in
the July and February 1995 Amiga
Reviews.

If your HD drive misbehaves,
make sure you're running the
patch program that should have
been provided with it; Workbench
2 almost handles HD drives prop-
erly, but not quite. If you're run-
ning the patch program, congratu-
lations! You've got another broken
piece of ha rdwa re!

A590 hiccups

I am the proud owner of an
Amiga 500 expanded to 1Mb
RAM. I bought the machine new
in 1987-88.

Recently I purchased a recondi-
tioned A 5 90 hard drive, pre-
installed with Workbench 1.3. I
have copied to the hard drive a
number of programs - Kind words,
Textcraft and a number of games.

These programs will not load
cleanly from the hard drive by
double clicking their icon. I always
get the requester "Insert volume

xxx in any drive"; when I cancel
the requester, the program contin-
ues to load. This also happens
when I try to print.

Further, I can't load a file from
its icon without read/write error
messages across the top of the win-
dow and the code No.218 appear-
ing; I then have to reboot. I can,
however, load the files from within
their creating program.

Have I incorrectly installed the
programs onto the hard drive?

Michael Lee,

South Penrith NSW

Dr Help: It sounds as if you
HAVE incorrectly installed the
programs, but that doesn 't account
for all your problems. Annoying
requesters for disks that don't exist
indicate something's got a default
path set to the original disk. Check
the Information for the icons you
run, and hunt about for anything
else set up with a reference to its
original disk. Replace these refer-
ences with pointers to your hard
drive. For example, if something's
looking for Diskname:L!foobar-
handler, change it to l:foobar-
handler.

Your strange read-write and
hanging problems, though, suggest
to me that there 's a problem with
the hard drive - some basic Work-
bench component's sitting on top
of a disk error, perhaps. If you're
using a stock A590 with the origi-
nal 20Mb XT-IDE drive in it, it
wouldn't surprise me at all if it'd
developed a few nasty glitches
over the years - though this partic-
ular manifestation's weird!

Try the A590 on a different
A500; I suspect it'll do the same
thing. A replacement 50Mb SCSI
drive in good nick, plus a bit of
labour to shift all your data over,
should come in at maybe $150,
tops, from a dealer. Faster, bigger,
fewer errors - it's what I'd do.

22

AMIGA Review

IDE or SCSI?

F recently bought an Al 200/40
and I want to get a decent hard
disk for it. I was wondering if you
could clear some things up for me.

Which is the best way to go -
IDE or SCSI? I've looked through
my back issues and cannot find
any articles comparing the two.
Maybe it would be worth doing
one? IDE seems more expensive
and from what I've heard it is
slower. Is this really the case? For
instance, a 720Mb Fast SCSI-2
drive and a Squirrel SCSI interface
cost about $650 together. For the
same price you get a 500Mb IDE.
And then you have to get it fitted.

My question is, when it says
$499 for a 720Mb SCSI drive, is
that all you have to pay or are there
more costs involved? I.e. does it
come in a box? Are there any other
cables or software I would need to
get?

Also, with IDE you can only
connect two devices, whereas with
the Squirrel you can have up to
seven devices hanging off your
machine.

Lastly, can you tell me the dif-
ference between SCSI, SCSI-2 and
Fast SCSI-2? I suspect that Fast
SCSI-2 is the best because it's got
Fast in front of it - is this the case?
Are there any compatibility prob-
lems with any of this gear and the
A1200?

Keep up the good work. You
produce an excellent mag.

P.S. I'd like to say hi to my
nephew in Perth, and that I will
hopefulty be seeing him on the net
soon.
Greg Hurst, Mission Beach Qld

Dr Help: IDE (Integrated
Drive Electronics), as you no
doubt know, is the control stan-
dard used by the little 40Mb drive
already in your A1200. It's an
interface hugely popular in the PC
world, because almost all of the
thinking's done by the drives - an

IDE "controller" on a PC is barely
more than a signal router from the
motherboard.

AI200 and A4000 IDE con-
trollers-, however, have rather
more to them because they make
IDE devices look like SCSI (Small
Computer Systems Interface) ones
to the computer - as you may have
noticed, as far as your 1200 's
concerned its hard drive is
controlled by scsi. device.

All things being equal, IDE
drives are cheaper than SCSI. It
hasn 't been a big difference for a
while now and with plummeting
prices of big hard drives it gets to
be pretty much irrelevant, but
they're still cheaper overall. The
reason why you 've seen IDE drives
as more expensive is that you've
probably been looking at prices for
3.5 inch SCSI drives (the most
common format) and 2.5 inch IDEs
(the size the 1200, 600 and various
non-Amiga portables use). 2.5 inch
devices are more expensive
because they're more miniaturised

Now, you can fit a 3.5 inch
device into a 1200 - it takes some
shoehorning but it can be done. Or
you can clumsily sit your big
clunky cheap IDE drive outside the
1200 with a ribbon cable feeding
back into the case; this is not
recommended by Vogue Living but
it gives you more storage for less
bucks. Or you can go SCSI. Again,
all things being equal SCSI is
indeed faster than IDE, but
whenever you start talking about
speed in the computer world you
end up qualifying statements like
this out of existence.

For example, if you use a
Squirrel it doesn 't matter if you
use the SCSI drive Commander
Data backs up his dreams on - it'll
still be none too quick, because the
Squirrel's a not particularly
inspired SCSI-1 controller. Sure, it
plugs into the PCMCIA port and
you can hot connect and
disconnect it, but from the SCSI

side it's not too exciting. A fast
IDE drive on the internal
controller will keep up with it, give
or take a bit.

When you buy a big SCSI drive
for $500, or whatever, what you
get is a drive, full stop. No cables,
no box, no set of steak knives.
Ditto IDEs, by the way; if no
extras are listed, assume no extras.

The reason for this is simple -
most people don 't need boxes and
cables. If you're putting the drive
inside your big-box Amiga or PC,
you slide it into a bay, connect a
power lead from the power supply
that's already there and a data
cable that's probably already there
too and away you go. This is the
case for putting a new 2.5 incher
into a 1200 - unplug the old, plug
in the new, boot from floppy and
set it up. It's more complex if
you're putting a second 2.5 inch
drive into a 1200, but not a huge
deal more.

For external use, which is what
you'll have to do if you get a big
SCSI drive, you'll need a few
extras. The external box, with a
power supply of its own (you could
splice into your 1200 supply but
it's not very muscular), will proba-
bly set you back around $150 - try
haggling when you get the drive.
Mounting the drive in the box is
not rocket science, but the dealer
will do it for you if you like.

You may also need a data cable
or adaptor, if the connector on the
end of the Squirrel (25 pin D style,
as I recall) and the connector on
the back of the box (commonly 50
pin Centronics or even the new
little 50 way Amphenols) don't
match. If you get an internal SCSI
controller for your 1200 instead of
the Squirrel, you'll need a 25 pin
D to whatever 's-on-the-box cable.
Expect a cable to cost, say, $30,
and you may be pleasantly
surprised. If you're handy with a
screwdriver and a soldering iron
you can make your own external

AMIGA Review

23

letters

^ ■

**■

box, or if you're planning to add
lots of devices you can just buy a
PC minitower case with power
supply for less than $200 - that'll
have room for a slab of drives and
more than enough power, as one of
my friends can testify (hi Mark!).

You 're quite right that you can
plug more devices into SCSI than
IDE - and IDE is known for its
temperamental insistence that
some models of drive not be used
together. This problem doesn 't pop
up nearly as often as it used to,
and Amiga dealers should all know
by now what not to sell,

SCSI, or SCSI-1, is the original
version, SCSI-2 adds extra
features but is, for your purposes,
essentially the same. Fast SCSI-2
only does anything if you 'ye got a
compatible controller, and then
you start getting into Fast Wide
SCSI-2 and differential mode and
101 other things you're never
going to do. Trust me.

SCSI-1 devices work with
SCSI-2 controllers, and vice versa.
Don't worry about your Squirrel,
or whatever, only being SCSI-1.
All it means is that if you get a
hairy chested superfast Bruce
Wayne Industries drive, it'll be
running not nearly as fast as it
could from your machine, I've got
a DEC drive at home in that very
situation. Don't let it bother you.

A500 questions

I have a problem that I hope
you can help me with. My system
comprises an A500 with 1/2 chip
RAM, 1/2 fast RAM and KS 2.04
ROM, a 1084S monitor, A1011
externa] drive and a Star NX 1000c
printer. My problem is this: Sud-
denly, in the middle of doing
something, the monitor display
will go a shade darker as if the
contrast has been turned down.
This is usually followed a few sec-
onds later by a flurry of very noisy
disk activity, always in the external
drive and sometimes in the internal

drive, which goes on for up to a
minute, but usually only seconds.
It does this regardless of whether a
disk is present in the drive or not.

Sometimes the disk drive activ-
ity light is lit and sometimes not,
also the power light sometimes
dims. Then things return to nor-
mal. This may occur a few times in
a hour, or it may be days between
occurrences. Any software running
at the time is totally oblivious to
this and carries on unaffected, but
if a disk is being written on, or
read from, it is usually wrecked -
i.e. unread/writable. What is caus-
ing this, and how can I fix it?
Could it be a CIA chip problem?

Also, on a dark display, my
monitor shows a series of fine
grey, nearly horizontal lines across
the screen. No external adjustment
knobs could remove them, and I
couldn't find any internal adjusters
(pots or the like) which looked
likely - a solder joint perhaps?

Finally, what version of
"Workbench" should I get to go
with my 2.04 ROMs? I only have
1.3, and couldn't get a complete
upgrade kit, just the chips.
Lincoln Thompson, DomevilleNZ

Dr Help: Oh, great. Bizarre
symptoms not obviously traceable
to any given component, and it's
intermittent, too! It could be the
power supply, it could be a dodgily
socketed chip, it could be aliens
trying to communicate. It could,
also, be the CIAs. Open the ma-
chine (if you can't do that unaided,
don't even think about trying this
stuff, and all usual not-my-fault
disclaimers apply), push down all
the chips after grounding yourself
on the disk drive casing, and use
the computer for a while with the
lid off and plenty of air circulation.
If the problem vanishes, it's ther-
mal or a loose chip; put the lid
back on and continue computing to
narrow it down. If the problem
stays - and it probably will - locate

the CIAs, note their orientation
(notch at one end), take them out
and put them in each other's sock-
ets, making sure they go in the
right way round. Now, if a CIA's
toast, the symptoms should change.
You "11 still have a nutty Amiga, but
it'll be a different colour of crazy.
If this happens, buy yourself a new
CIA for $40 odd mail order and
swap it for each of the existing
ones in turn, to find which one's
dead. If you 're really lucky, both
will be.

If it's not the CIAs, though,
pack the machine off to a servi-
ceperson. Good luck finding one
over the Tasman.

If the monitor problem bothers
you, any computer repair joint
should be able to fix it. If it's a
1084 clone type, a clever TV re-
pairman will do. Do NOT muck
about with your monitor yourself,
for two reasons.

One, there's 40 kilovolts on the
back of that tube, it can hang
about longer than you'd think, and
pine boxes are very unflattering to
one's figure, if you catch my drift.

Two, uninformed trimmer-
twiddling is the number one cause
of irritated Real Servicemen and
huge repair bills, as the Guy Who
Knows What He's Doing tries to
figure out what the Guy Who
Thought He Could Do It actually
did. On this note, allow me to
mention that if anyone out there
simply HAS to wade into electronic
servicing with no particular quali-
fications, check out the September
Electronics Australia, which has
an excellent article on the subject
with much wise advice.

Workbench 2.1 will work with
your v37.175 ROMs. You can use
anything back to v2.04 just fine,
but 2.1 comes with the cool
CrossDOS stuff so it's worth
getting. You could have some
trouble finding the disks legally,
though, as you're no doubt
discovering.

\

24

AMIGA Review

Software V

The Amiga

learns another

language

By Daniel Rutter

► You've probably heard of Cross-
DOS, the AmigaDOS extension
that lets you read and write PC for-
mat floppy disks. A cutdown ver-
sion of CrossDOS comes with all
AmigaDOS versions from 2.1 up,
and so most people have it already.

CrossMAC is the same thing,
for Macintosh format disks. But, I
hear you ask, why bother? Macs
can read DOS disks, so why bother
making your disks native Mac for-
mat? Who cares?

Well, there are a number of
good reasons. To start with a mun-
dane but significant one, Mac files
can have up to 31 characters in
their name, against the hardwired
8.3 MS-DOS limit. Restricted file-
names cause much pain among
people who have to tolerate
trimmed filenames and nonsense
suffixes when moving files around.
If you're moving a load of long-
named data files to a Mac for use
with a pre-rolled script that works
on the Amiga and Mac versions of
Program X, it's much nicer to be
able to use the script straight with-
out changing all the listed names.

More importantly, CrossMAC
lets you use Mac formatted re-

movable media, which covers a lot
more than floppies. If you want to
move a SyQuest-load of data from
your Amiga to a Mac, getting it on
the right format to start with is a
big help. Sure, you can use a PC
SyQuest on the Amiga and also on
the Mac, bul since Mac users upon
occasion live up to the stereotype
of not being able to find their glu-
teus maximi with both manipulato-
ry appendages, it doesn't hurt to
use the native lingo.

The CrossMAC manual warns
that there are strange and subtle
formatting options involved in
Mac removable media and the bet
strategy is to have the cartridge
formatted on the Mac the data's
going to, but in the one test I did I
formatted a cart on the Amiga and
it worked fine.

CrossMAC also lets you access
Mac Hierarchical File System
(HFS) formatted CD-ROM discs,
but this is not a big selling point
since ail decent CD-ROM filesys-
tems, such as the excellent Astm-
CDFS, also handle HFS CDs.

Like CrossDOS, CrossMAC
doesn't let you run Mac programs,
translate files into Amiga -comp-

rehensible form or do anything
else emulator-ish. It just lets you
read and write the disks. But it
does that very well.

Setting up

Installing CrossMAC is a high-
ly automated procedure, although
it pays to keep your eye on the in-
staller, whose default options can
give you rather more Mac drives
than you want. It's all standard
AmigaDOS stuff, though, so you
can fix problems easily later if you
have to.

Zzzzz...

As is traditional for non-native
floppy and hard disk formats on
Amigas not running hardware em-
ulators, hard and floppy disk ac-
cess is not speedy. Amiga floppy
drives are none too fast io start
with, since even the HD models
don'l move data any faster than the
1985 originals, but making them
work with Mac or MS-DOS
filesystems slows things down still
more.

If you want to format a high
density Mac disk, be ready to put
aside the thick end of six minutes

AMIGA Review

25

(about half the speed of formatting
an Amiga HD disk, and margin ally-
slower even than formatting PC
disks). I have no idea how long the
thing took to format a 44Mb
SyQuest, but twice the normal time
seems about right.

If you want to deal with stan-
dard Mac 800K disks, with their
highly entertaining variable -speed
Superdrive format, you'll need a
Mac drive and the old Amax car-
tridge or a regular Amiga double
density drive and an Amax 11+ or
Amax IV card. Fortunately, Apple
came to their senses when they set
down the high density Mac disk
format, and so if you've got a high
density drive on your Amiga you
can deal with 1440K Mac floppies.

Mac-DOS 101

The Mac operating system is an
excellent example of the swan
principle - apparent grace and
serenity, frantic activity below the
surface. Using CrossMAC you get
to see some of the extra gubbins
that makes Macs work as they do.

For a start, Mac files aren't one
entity, like Amiga or MS-DOS
files. A Mac file has a data "fork",
which contains the actual file in-
formation, and a resource fork,
which looks to us like a separate
file and behaves like our .info files,
only more so - it contains icon in-
fo, path to the application to use
with the file, customisation info for
the application and piles of other
stuff. This is quite cool; it means
Mac users taking a file from their
machine to someone else's will
find the other machine's quite sep-
arate version of the application au-
tomatically set up like their one at
home. Cool, but complex.

On top of this, there's a sepa-
rate piece of data buried in the
filesystem for every file that con-
tains the "finder" information,
which holds four character codes
for file type and creating program
and, naturally, tons of other stuff.

Fortunately, CrossMAC makes
all this stuff easy to deal with, if
you have to, Resource forks, invis-
ible to Mac users, can be shown as
files with .rs suffixes, and the Re-
source Extractor program lets you
view or extract data from them.

Finder information can be ma-
nipulated with the FindeT Manager
program, which lets you easily set
the type and creator for files. This
is important, because Mac files
without a type won't appear in file
requesters. Files that originate on a
Mac will have their Finder info
ready-set, but if you make a file on
the Amiga it won't - necessarily.

This section of CrossMAC s
been well thought out too, because
you don't have to run Finder Man-
ager for every file you create to
make it visible to Mac applica-
tions. If you use the right suffix
when you put a file onto a Mac
disk - .txt for text, .tif for TIFF and
so on - CrossMAC can set the
Finder info without you doing a
thing. And, naturally, you can add
more file types to the database.

As if this wasn't enough,
there's MacBinary as well. MacBi-
nary is a semi-archived format that
combines the data and resource
forks, plus the Finder data, into a
single file for transfer. CrossMAC
detects MacBinary files and auto-
matically splits them up when
they're written to a CrossMAC
disk, and recombines them again
when the file's read.

Other utilities

There's a Mac file salvage pro-
gram included, too, which over-
comes one problem with using al-
ternative filesystems - none of
your disk repair utilities work. This
program can't actually fix corrupt
Mac disks, but it will let you sal-
vage files from them to elsewhere,
which is good enough.

There's also a simple switch-
able automatic text translator,
which deals with international

characters in text files that differ
between platforms, and a basic hex
viewer for checking out file con-
tents, which is invoked by default
when you double click a file on a
Mac disk.

Grind, grind...

The only problem you're likely
to strike when using CrossMAC is
frantic drive flogging on disk in-
sertion. If you're running Cross-
DOS and CrossMAC on top of
AmigaDOS's standard floppy han-
dling, the three filesystems will
beat fresh disks senseless trying to
figure out who owns them. There
are two possible solutions to this
problem. The simplest is to just
keep CrossMAC, and even Cross-
DOS, turned off until you need
tliem. The DOSDriver icons are
easy to keep handy somewhere
they're not going to be executed by
default, and a double click will
give you the new filesystem.

Alternately, check out Multi-
FileSystem, in the public domain
(and, by the way, on my HotPD 24
companion disk set, $9.50 the pair
from Prime Artifax on 1800 252
879, ring now!). This nifty pro-
gram bundles all of the filesystems
for a given device together and re-
duces mutual trampling. It's not
perfect, but it's a heck of an im-
provement.

Go buy it!

The slim CrossMAC manual is
excellent, giving everyone from
rank beginners to the tech no -
curious all they need to know in 58
pages. I dare say even a Mac user
could understand it. Overall, this is
a well thought out, efficiently con-
structed package that fills a need
and fills it well. If you transfer
files to and from Macs, CrossMAC
will make your life much easier.

Contact Desktop Utilities on
(06) 239 6658 for more informa-
tion.

26

AMIGA Review

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Faster, better
smarter

Guru-ROM updates
your GVP SCSI board

By Daniel Rutter

I If you've got a hard disk
equipped Amiga, there's a decent
chance it uses a GVP controller.
And if you use a GVP controller,
there's an excellent chance it's one
of their Series II models - the
A2000HC+8, A4008, A2000HC,
A500HD Series II, A530 Turbo,
Combo 030, G-Force 030 and 040,
even the Fang A 1200 SCSI card
(though not the A1291).

Well, folks, if you're a member
of this not-so-exclusive group, you
now have the opportunity to make
your hard disk considerably faster
for $140.

The gadget in question is called
the Guru-ROM V6, and it comes
from Schatztruhe (Treasure Chest),
a company better known for its
software products, including the
excellent Aminet CD-ROM series.
It promises more speed, better
compatibility with outlandish de-
vices, and fixes for a variety of an-
noying hardware and software
bugs - and, as far as I can see, it
delivers.

What you get

The GuruRom is a weeny bit of
hardware - a little 28 pin ROM

chip just like the one that's already
on the board of your GVP con-
troller, only this one's mounted on
a bit of circuit board with some ex-
tra logic on a little chip underneath
it and machine pins sticking out
the bottom to go into the ROM
socket.

Getting up

Installation's easy enough; line
the new ROM-board combo up the
same way the old ROM was, ig-
nore the worrying couple of gaps
in the pins that suggest something
broke off when you pulled it off
the antistatic foam it comes on,
shift a jumper or two as advised by
the manual and power up.

Your old gvpscsi. device is now
gone, replaced by omniscsi. device.
Anything that refers explicitly to
SCSI device names, like some
cache software for example, will
now complain, but bull through to
Workbench, copy over a few mod-
ified versions of the standard GVP
programs (just the little ones - the
standard prep programs work fine
with a change to the tooltypes or
command line), edit your startup a
tad, and you're in business.

Wossit do?

Naturally, I made numbers on
my system before and after Guru-
ROM installation, and the results
were quite impressive. I use an
A530 hanging off my preposter-
ously expanded A500, and this box
is the functional equivalent of a
40MHz 030 Combo board for a
2000. I did speed tests on my nice
fast 1Gb DEC hard drive, and also
a 230Mb Bernoulli removable car-
tridge drive. As always, your
mileage can and will vary, depend-
ing on drive, processor and con-
troller, but I can't see anyone not
seeing a marked improvement.

Turning first to the Amiga's
finest random number generator,
Sysinfo, I ran its drive reading
speed test on the DEC with the old
ROM and got an uninspiring
950k/S or so. Now, this has noth-
ing much to do with the real world
- it just sucks data off the drive and
sends it nowhere as fast as it can -
but it gives a fair idea of the raw
info-pumping prowess of your SC-
SI system.

New ROM, new test - result
about 2.1MWS! Whoa! Hey!
We're onto something here! Let's

28

AMIGA Review

see if DiskSpeed's as complimen-
tary!

Predictably, no. Once you do a
"real" drive speed test, moving ac-
tual files and scanning actual di-
rectories and such, system over-
heads come into play and raw
transfer becomes less important.

Nonetheless, the new Guru-
ROM system did well. With Hy-
percache, my drive cache of
choice, disabled, the new ROM
was a shade faster on file manipu-
lation - about 10% better on file
opens, directory scanning and
seek/read, and the same speed for
file creates and deletes.

The advantage was not pro-
nounced on the silly 512 byte
buffer test - neck and neck on cre-
ates and writes, 8% faster on reads
- but once the buffer got bigger the
new ROM showed its stuff. With a
4k buffer, it was still much the
same for creates and writes but a
hefty 48% faster on reads; 32k
buffering made it respectively
16%, 31% and 67% speedier, and
the 256k buffer topped it out on
24%, 50% and 82% faster - final
scores of 650, 1 19 and 1770k/S re-
spectively. Not bad for a clunky
old 500.

CPU availability was un-
changed; the new ROM's sup-
posed to suck less CPU time, but I
found the difference marginal at
best.

The slower Bernoulli drive
showed a less marked improve-
ment. While its seek/read score
skyrocketed from 82 to 184 fdes
per second (a 224% boost!), direc-
tory scan was only 10% better and
the others were much the same.
The transfer rate improved, but not
by nearly as much as the DEC
drive's; it topped out for the 256k
buffer at about 28% better on
writes and reads, and actually
slower on creates {Benchmarks.
Who needs 'em anyway?). CPU
usage was 7% lower. Hurrah.

When I turned the cache back

on and flogged the DEC drive with
and without the new ROM, the
new system scored a bit better on
directory manipulation - 10%
faster for creates and opens, 10%
slower for deletes, equal for seek
and scan - and in the data transfer
tests the new ROM came up 30%
slower for creates, 40% faster for
writes and precisely equal for
reads. Software caches add extra
factors to any hardware storage
comparison - a slow drive on a fast
computer will beat a fast drive on a
slow computer handily if they're
both got big caches - but since
most serious users run a cache, I
thought it was fair to test it.

With the cache, by the way,
CPU availability wasn't great, and
was practically zero on the RAM-
bashing read operations - but the
new ROM did cut CPU use by bet-
ter than 10% on the others.

Documentation

I have to mention the manual
that comes with the Guru-ROM. In
a mere 55 pages, it contains more
information on SCSI as it pertains
to the Amiga than I've ever seen in
one place before. The guys that put
this package together have thought
of EVERYTHING, and they've
put it all down on paper. It's still
pretty heavy going in many places,
but if you're under the impression
that down and dirty low-level SC-
SI bashing is easy to get a handle
on, you're in for a nasty surprise
anyway.

The manual is well written,
well laid out - it may be thin, but
important information's included

more than once if necessary to re-
duce page-flicking - and absolutely
packed with gems of data that
show that the authors could build a
Wide Fast SCSI-II controller from
rubber bands and egg cartons in
the dark.

Software

All of your old SCSI utilities
will work with the omniscsi-
device, but a few programs are in-
cluded for twiddling Rigid Disk
Block (RDB) settings, driver set-
tings and so on. You can set up
RDB -type parameters in the driver,
so you don't have to commit possi-
bly disastrous configurations to
RDB and discover you've sealed
your corkscrew in your bottle
when you reboot. It's all well built
and exhaustively documented -
power user system tweaking
doesn't get any easier.

Eh?

The only thing that puzzles me
about the Guru-ROM is that on the
back of the manual, and the back
of the box, it says "not made in
Australia", between a couple of lit-
tle kangaroos. I have absolutely no
idea what this signifies. Anyone
who knows gets a free subscrip-
tion.

The verdict

If you have a 9Mb A500 with
an A530, DEC RZ26 drive, NEC
3X CD-ROM, 230Mb Bernoulli
drive, Golden Image optical mouse
and Sony Multiscan HG monitor,
feel free to take all of my bench-
marks. Otherwise, just be advised -
this gizmo WILL make your old
GVP controller noticeably faster,
and it may make it MUCH faster
for some operations. The exact re-
sults depend on your system. Is it
worth $140, though? You bet!
Contact Amadeus on (02) 651
1711 for more information.

AMIGA Review

29

column [■eHrteii

3 ^f >-)».^3"

► Hey! The Information Super-
highway must be right around the
comer! I know it must, those
Telstra ads say it is!

For any lucky souls who've
managed not to notice the adver-
tisements, they centre around em-
ployees of the- organisation- which-
untii-recently-was-called-Telecom,
who do Tardis tricks with vans and
lure unsuspecting kids down to
play games in drains. But forget
the medium; the message is that
the much-bally hooed Superhigh-
way's right around the corner, and
with a simple little box on top of
the TV you can be a part of it, en-
joying online banking, and shop-
ping, and, uh, banking, and, urn,
lots of other stuff.

There are some facts among the
hype, but also some problems. On
the plus side, there is indeed quite
a lot of optic fibre laid around
Australia and around the world,
ready to make superfast communi-
cation possible. Optic fibre can
carry orders of magnitude more
data than copper cables, and
there's no doubt that global fibre
communications will happen
someday.

At the moment the vast bulk of
the world's optic fibre's referred to
as "dark fibre"; it's there, but it
ain't doing anything yet. Telecom-
munications companies around the
world have just been taking advan-
tage of other people's cable laying
and pipe maintenance to piggyback
their fibre intc^ the conduits; it's
cheap from a corporate viewpoint,

it doesn't matter if it doesn't do
anything for a while, and it lets
them draw impressive maps of
their fibre coverage.

And, if and when home shop-
ping and home banking get going
properly, you will indeed be able
to hook up to the fibre running past
your front gate, in much the same
way as people hook up to cable TV
- a Telstra or other communication
company worker will turn up,
make a hole somewhere, splice in
a line, take your money and bingo,
you're in.

The only problem is, there's
nothing to be into yet, and no way
to get there if there was. Pilot plans
are being tried out in various
places around the world, but you
can't go out and buy a set-top box
to hook up, and there aren't any
services to hook up to - all the tra-
ditional modem -access online ser-
vices are ready and waiting for
your patronage, but there's nothing
that qualifies as a wall-of-screens
Superhighway-level experience.

This doesn't mean there never
will be any services, of course. But
governments and corporations are
taking it slowly and carefully and
trying to make sure the money gets
spent by someone else and the
profits go to them. Understandable,
common enough, and guaranteed
to make sure nothing much hap-
pens for quite some time. It takes a
group with the power to set a sys-
tem up all by itself to get the ball
rolling, and then Microsoft- style
anti-monopoly obstacles arise.

Why aren't governments and
corporations striding arm in arm
towards the glowing global net-
work future? Well, apart from the
fact that they're governments and
corporations, neither of which is
renowned for cooperation and logi-
cal action, the precedents send
mixed messages. Cable TV has
been a runaway success in the
USA, even with quite widespread
theft of cable services via unli-

censed decoders, so that would
seem to suggest that people
wouldn't mind spending even
more time staring at the box.

But France, the only country
that actually has a working, practi-
cally universal citizen-to-citizen
data network, would seem to pro-
vide a case against. France's Mini-
tel system uses antique low speed
hardware - it's essentially a glori-
fied two-way Teletext - but when it
first emerged great things were
predicted, and much was said
about the people's forum, demo-
cratic advancement, corporate in-
volvement, blah blah blah. What
the vast bulk of the Minitel traf-
fic's ended up devoted to, though,
is citizen-to-citizen discussion of
sex.

There's big money in sex, of
course, but the world's big pornog-
raphy companies, even working to-
gether, have approximately one
chance in ten grillion of getting
anyone important officially inter-
ested in a Smut Superhighway.

Another popular argument for
maintaining the present, Super-
highwayless status quo, is the oft-
made statement that there's no
public demand for superpowered
online services. People have been
surveyed. Experts have been con-
sulted. It would appear nobody
wants it.

But that doesn't mean vendors
can't manufacture a market for the
Superhighway. Nobody wanted
Post-It notes until someone invent-
ed them; I dare anybody reading
this to put their hand on their heart
and say they've never seen an ad
for a product they didn't know
they needed until then. Heck,
Demtel wouldn't exist if you
couldn't manufacture markets.

If there's a buck in it, and I
think there is, then people will do
it. Eventually. Not necessarily as
soon as Telstra would like you to
think, but not very long after the
turn of the century.

30

AMIGA Review

f

And assuming the Supernet or
Superhighway or Globe web or
whatever it ends up being called
exists, and people can access it as
easily and pretty much as cheaply
as they now access TV, there are
lots of cool things you could do
with it besides paying off your
Visa and ordering Tupperware.
One idea that rather appeals to me
is cutting out the middleman in the
sale of creative works.

It works like this. Say you, like
me, are a writer. You write an in-
spiring, incisive piece on the im-
pact of cosmic rays on dual nonlin-
ear overhead induction landing
lights. You know for a fact that out
there somewhere are a good
1 0,000 people, out of the five bil-
lion or so on the planet, who want
to know about this subject, and
don't mind paying.

The problem you face today is
getting your work to the people
who are willing to give you money
for it. You can approach a maga-
zine that publishes such material,
and if it's accepted they'll pay you
a bit for it. But they'll take the
sales profits, and that's it.

Now, let's pretend the Hypernet
exists, and you can put your article
somewhere where people who
want to know about it will look - a
discussion forum on the subject.
People view the article, and if they
think it's any good they can click a
button and automatically take, say,
ten cents from their bank account
and put it into yours - a kind of lit-
erary shareware, il" you will. If
10,000 people do that, you've
made a thousand bucks out of your
article, which is probably more
than the magazine would have paid
you by a healthy margin.

Shareware has a mixed reputa-
tion for money -making efficacy in
the computer world - nobody's
made any reliable figures on the
number of people who use share-
ware and don't register it, but it's a
very large proportion.

^Shareware

that works. Now

there's a

concept!"

Why don't people register
shareware? Well, although it's gen-
uinely and truly illegal to keep us-
ing a shareware package past the
registration period, you're more
likely to be shot dead for jaywalk-
ing than busted for not registering
shareware.

If there's a local registration
point for the package, you just
have to ring and, with any luck,
you can use a credit card to regis-
ter. Otherwise, though, you have to
go to the trouble of writing out a
cheque (mailing cash is illegal in
many countries, including Aus-
tralia) or getting a money order in
some other currency, the handling
fee for which will be a large por-
tion of the total value, and then
mailing it off to a person who
might or might not, for all you
know, still be at that address. Reg-
istering shareware is often awk-
ward and annoying.

But what if registering were
much cheaper and much simpler -
click a button, pay a buck, peace of
mind and the registered version on
its way to you in five seconds?
Easier than flicking a coin into a
busker's hat.

To make this work, you need a
secure, financially capable network
with near-zero fees, but if you've
got it the possibilities are huge.

Let's take it further. Say you're
not a specialised writer, but a pop-
ular musician or other mass-market

artist. You produce your latest
work, you release it, a hundred
million people grab it and play it
or look at it or tickle its tummy or
do whatever it is people do with
your artworks. Sting each one of
those people for one lousy cent and
you've got a megabuck right there.
Make it a dollar and you can start
pricing islands. Get the picture?

What people are paying for
now is not music, or prose, or pic-
tures. They're paying for CD
pressing, booklet printing, maga-
zine production, distribution
charges - a hundred middlemen be-
tween you and the source of the
product. But if the product can be
expressed in a simple, weightless
packet of bytes, as a whole load of
products can, then it can be dis-
tributed for close to nothing. All
the intermediate stages can be cut
out and the artist need only charge
as much as he or she was getting
off the top before. Assuming the
existence of a practically universal
Superhighway, audiences will also
get bigger (even taking into ac-
count some unavoidable trouble in
finding what you want), so prices
can drop further as markets ex-
pand.

This wouldn't mean the death
of the magazine industry, though it
would produce a huge metamor-
phosis. I reckon my job's safe; I
write and I edit, and until someone
comes up with an automatic way to
do both of those tasks (right after
the household robot, but before an-
tigravity) I'll be able to keep doing
them. But if I was one of the guys
who man the vast presses that print
this magazine, I'd be more ner-
vous; if I was the guy who owns
the whole suburb-sized place
where this and a pile of other mag-
azines are printed, I'd be looking
to move my millions pretty soon.

□

AMIGA Review

31

COtUMM.;;|.et|

... , .

Tables Explained

1 Last month I explained how to
make the most of Wordworth's ex-
cel lent Template feature. This time
I'll explore the table feature.

Wordworth's table function is
useful in a number of ways. The
number is two. You can enter fig-
ures and text, and do various cal-
culations such as totals, minimum,
maximum and average. This fea-
ture of Word worth isn't nearly as
comprehensive as a proper spread-
sheet, but it's handy for quickly
drawing up invoices and orders -
coupled with the Template func-
tion, it's reasonably usable. If you
want to do your company's budget
on your Amiga, get a dedicated
spreadsheet.

The other useful function for
tables is formatting text into sec-
tions without having to make a
million text boxes. For this tutorial
we'll do an order for party sup-
plies, also using the letter template
we made last month.

Bring up your letter template
and move the yours sincerely part
down by inserting a few carriage
returns. Now bring up the drawing
tools menu and select the drag ta-
ble button. Drag a table the width
of the page and the length of the
visible part of the page.

Drag the first column in a bit
by putting the cursor over it, click-
ing and dragging. Make the second
as wide as it'll go without remov-
ing the third column. Place the cur-
sor in the first "Cell" and type
"Quantity" or similar; you can eas-

ily move through the table by
pressing Tab to go forward and
Shift-Tab to go back.

The second column is going to
display the item's name so put
Item in the next cell. The third col-
umn is for prices, so label it appro-
priately.

Now enter the text and num-
bers in the table the same way you
entered the column titles (fig 1).

You can now calculate the total
amount the order will cost without
using a calculator, or much brain-
power. Just put the text insertion
point at the bottom right of the ta-
ble and select Tools/Calculate, and
Wordworth will display a menu
with the calculations available (fig
2). Select the cells above and total
options and then Calculate. Your
Amiga will think for a few
milliseconds, then insert the total
of all the above cells in the current
cell in the current font (See fig 3).

I'll give you that this function
isn't a very good example of
today's computing power, but it'd
take Holly of Red Dwarf several
hours. You may want to design a
template with your company logo
and a similar table for invoices,
which probably won't speed up the
creation process but will look nicer
and save you having to work out
the subtotals and totals.

If you want to quickly and eas-
ily draw up things which involve
calculations and tables, check Tur-
boCalc out. But for the occasional
job, Wordworth's table and number
handling is quite adequate.

Now I'll show you how to use
tables to format text more attrac-
tively. Select Project/New and then
normal document. Draw a table the
width and about half the length of
the page. Pick your own topic to
populate the cells with (fig 4). The
beauty of using a table here is that
you don't have to use tabs or text
boxes, which makes it all very
simple.

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Fig 3.

Making Fancy Labels

Wordworth has one tool that
places it in a category all of its
own when it comes to
wordprocessors - the floating text
box. You can make text sit pretty
much anywhere on the page, just
like a real desktop publishing
program. In this short tutorial,
we're going to make a page of
fancy disk labels usng the text box
tool, along with the group tool.
Here's how it's done.

t. Start by measuring up your
labels - you might find the
dimensions are ahead y printed on

32

AMIGA Review

AM

c

the back of the cover page at the
top of the label packet. Because
Wordworth doesn't have any grid
tools, or box distribute tools (like
Professional Page for example),
you'll need to know the location of
each label's top left comer from
the top and left edge of the page.
Work it out, and write down the
necessary margin settings on a
spare sheet.

2. Start a new project, then go
to the Format, Document pull
down menu option. Make sure the
page size is correct, then as a
guide, adjust the margin settings to
match the margins around the
labels as a group.

3. Now select the drawing tools
button, and choose the text tool
from the resulting floating tool
box. Draw a box roughly the size
of the top left labels, following the
margin guides. Now choose
Object, Information from the pull
down menus. This is an important
requestor, with features similar to a
box information window in any
desktop publishing program.
Here's where you'll need the
figures you wrote down before.
Adjust the Front Left and From
Top values to match your own
measurements. Also adjust the
width and height to that of the
individual label size (most labels
are 9cm x 5cm). You will also
want to alter the margin settings
for this text box, so that any text is
away from the edge of the label.
Make sure the Thickness setting is
none - and then close the box.

4. The next step is vital. From
the Object pull down menu, choose
Lock. Now you won't accidentally
bump the box, and you can start
adding text inside for the label.
You can add other components
using the drawing tools on the
floating tool bar, or the Object,
Place Picture pull down menu.

E1K

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Explanation

Upon investigating a derelict vessel at the bed of an ocean ■
planet. Lister and the boys are infected with a despair
viniB. They begin to hallucinate that for the last four years
they have been playing a T IV and had just been killed by a ■
nasty collision with something rather solid.

Lister is woken up after ZOO years in deep sleep to find that
Bed Dwarf has been stolen and they have been chasing it
ever since. The crew are forced to fly through an asteroid
belt where they encounter PsirenSj who enjoy sucking out
humans brains. At First, the crew aren't worried but it
turns out that Lister in fact has brains to suck out.

Fig 4.

Once you have one jazzy label
you're happy with, go to the next
step.

5. Select the pointer tool and
drag a bounding box around all the
parts of your label, including the
original text box. Choose Object,
Group, Now select Edit, Copy and
then Edit, Paste. You've now made
a copy (which is probably missing
the text depending on your
revision number) - but you can't
move it as the text box is locked -
which effectively locks the whole
group, so choose Object, Unlock.
Now double click inside the group
bounding box and you'll get the
Group Information window. Now
you can enter the From Left and
Frop Top settings for the right
hand label in the first row of labels
and there's you first row of labels.

6. Now select the pointer, and
drag a bounding box around the
entire first row. Select Object,

Page 1

Number Locfc

Group. Then Copy and Paste the
group. Double click the group to
open the Group Information
window, and enter the From Left
and From Top settings for the first
label in the second row. Now do
Copy, Paste and double click again
to enter the position of the third
row - and so on, for as many rows
as you need.

7. The final step is to go to the
main text box on the first label and
then copy and paste the text onto
the other labels. You'll have to
ungroup everything first. Now
you're ready to print!

TIP: When filling out margin
settings and the like, use Amiga-X
to delete the box contents, enter a
new value, then press TAB to go to
the next item to be filled out... it's
much quicker than using the
mouse.

□

AMIGA Review

33

galJEx

I The tips are starting to roll in -
but we need more! If you've got
something to share with us on get-
ting the most out of your favourite
productivity software, fax, write or
e-mail them in. All published tips
will receive a one year FREE sub-
scription. How's that for a bit of
bribery?

It's been a good month for seri-
ous software - two impressive ap-
plications rolled across my desk.
The first was POSWTZ, which is
reviewed elsewhere in this issue.
It's got one of the best AMOS in-
terfaces I've ever seen in such a
program. The other is Share Man-

ager, a full review of which we
hope to have together by next
month.

It's certainly encouraging to
see such high calibre software
turning up. I noticed too that
there's an increasing number of
business programs popping up on
Aminet. On CompuServe I pulled
down a large number of interesting
macros for FinalWriter. Personal-
ly, I use Wordworth, but Final
Writer is probably a better package
for working with long documents.
It has style tags, for starters, and
the ability to create macros that
can store many steps required to
perform a complex task and exe-
cute them in sequence from a sin-
gle menu command. This function
may turn up in Wordworth 4.0,
which is promised late this year.

Share Manager

A little more info on this win-
ner. Share Manager will manage
shares and other financial unit in-
vestments. It includes index
graphs, daily share price move-

'g.Hwmer W'.M>-JClt!r*talV«r:9.t

ments, share price and volume
graphs including overlay indices,
line or bar charts and selectable pe-
riods. The program is aimed at the
personal investor or small trader.

There are limits to the value or
size of a portfolio - but these
should be more than enough for
most investors. You'll need Work-
bench 2.0 or better, an internal
clock (or use Preferences every
time you boot), and a printer
would be a good idea. If you want
more information, call Muller Pub-
lishing on (09) 381 4180, or write
to them at 7 Ellen Street, Subiaco
WA 6008.

Digita Organiser

I have been making constant
use of Digita's wonderful Organis-
er program - but there are a few
features I'd like to see them add.
Top of the list is an AREXX port,
and the reason is very simple.

On my PC I can use one pro-
gram to send faxes, write letters,
and keep track of people I deal
with. On the Amiga I can almost
do the same thing for much less
money, but right now it is a little
less elegant. You see, in an ideal
world I would organise my entire
day with Organiser, and then keep
using it throughout the day to do
things.

Say I have to send you a fax or
a letter. I would pull up your con-
tact record and then initiate an
AREXX script that took the infor-
mation from that record, ran Final
Writer (or Wordworth 4.0 perhaps)
and then inserted your details so
that I was now looking at a letter
complete with salutation, addresses

Left: Share Manager

34

AMIGA Review

- everything. Next up, I fill in the
body and print to fax, or printer.
The final step here is to have a text
file attached to each contact record
that contains a log of my action
thus creating a history of every
dealing with each person on my
database. This was partly the pur-
pose of the program I partly wrote
in CanDo that was mentioned last
month .

I certainly stand by my original
comments however - for a version
1.0 product Organiser is splendid
and deserves every success. If you
have your Amiga on all day on
your desk or workstation, this is
THE program to help you to get
organised. It will track events, lists
of things to do, and people. If you
have not seen Organiser run call
Amadeus on (02) 65 1 17 1 1 and
ask for a free demo copy. (Version
2.0 is in the works - more info on
what it will do as soon as we know
more!)

Final Write Add Ons

We've released a new disk es-
pecially for Final Writer fans con-
taining a numbec of useful macros.
FinalWaver creates sine-waves out
of text. There's macros for easy
centering, stretching and expand-
ing of objects.

You can easily convert text into
blocks, resize grouped objects,
and add a three dimensional shad-
ow to a selected block of text. Fi-
nalFax95 makes switching be-
tween the GP-Fax and regular print
driver easier - without switching
screens. There's also macros for
printing envelopes, and some real
tricky stuff that lets you wrap text
around a shape! To order call our
mail order hotline on 1-800 252
879.

Easy Ledgers Update

I am very interested to hear
from people using EasyLedgers 2
We've been running the program
here at Storm Front Studios - but

only for accounts receivable. Some
feedback from businesses using the
entire program would be useful.
Small-Biz Software are now ship-
ping revision .06 which has some
small bug fixes, and GST for other
countries. The retail price has been
dropped down to $299 - making
the program a very reasonable of-
fering indeed.

There's certainly room for im-
provement in the invoice design
module to cater for the weird and
wonderful letter heads people have
these days!

Payments not matching
invoices

We had this problem - someone
pays an account, you enter it in and
then somehow the invoice keeps
popping up on the statement. The
trick is to be sure you actually
choose the invoice to apply the
payment to. You do this by double
clicking on the invoice to apply the
payment to in the sales receipt
window.

TIP of the month

Digita Organiser: This is an
easy feature to miss and one
that is sadly lacking from simi-
lar program on other platforms
costing much more money! If
you have schedule an appoint-
ment - or thing to do on a cer-
tain day - and then decide it is
in fact just a task, no problem.
Simply select the appointment,
choose Edit, Copy (or Left-
Am ig a- Am iga-C) then flick
over to Tasks and choose paste.
You've now moved your ap-
pointment to the task list. Now
delete the original appointment.
You can go the other way too!
This is a big time saver.

Q

BELOW: Digita Organiser - the
diary in action.

.±MIGA Review

: 3MMUHKATION5

Net News

Big Brother doesn 't know

where to look,..

By Daniel Rutter

I The Western Australian Inter-
net Association (WAIA) has spo-
ken out against ill-informed media
hysteria and wanton story infla-
tion. The flurry of "The Internet
Turns Your Kids Into Hippie Nazi
Anarchist Rapist" stories seems to
have subsided, but it's left in its
wake a public rather skeptical
about the redeeming social value
of this apparently iniquitous entity.

The trouble is, the Internet still
isn't anything like a common pas-
time. The WAIA states in its recent
press release that less than 3% of
the Australian population actually
has any form of access to the Inter-
net. This figure seems pretty plau-
sible to me, especially the "less
than" part; if you include all those
people with access to Internet elec-
tronic mad via simple bulletin
board systems then 3% could be
about right.

With so few people actually ac-
cessing the net - and far fewer of
them telling the world their own
experiences online - it's hardly sur-
prising that tabloid TV and overex-
cited periodicals can make people
believe anything about the Inter-
net. Sure, you can find out how to
make TNT and marijuana brown-
ies on the net, but information just

as alarming is available in public
libraries. What the Stories No Par-
ent Should Miss fail to mention is,
as the WAIA points out, "the posi-
tive side of the 'net as an unparal-
leled communications medium, so-
cial interaction area and a source
of seemingly infinite information".
What has the WAIA particular-
ly hot and bothered is that the na-
tion's politicians have been listen-
ing to the mass media just like ev-
eryone else. Now, both State and
Federal governments have decided
to expend their energy on censor-
ing the Internet,

As the WAIA says: "In a recent
meeting of State and Federal At-
torneys-General, an interim deci-
sion was reached to pass legisla-
tion that would result in a 'self reg-
ulated industry', with the industry

moderating and judging its own
actions," The problem is that the
legislation in question treats all on-
line services much the same - as if
they are simple bulletin boards.
This is like studying bicycles, not-
ing that they're pretty narrow and
then passing a law that says all
roads should be repainted with
three times as many lanes.

A car is not a bike, and the In-
ternet is not a bulletin board. Self-
regulation of the Internet would
need a huge revamp of the current
Internet Service Provider (ISP) and
dial-up account holder system, be-
cause what the legislation in ques-
tion's trying to forbid is the trans-
mission of objectionable material,
and especially the access of un-
suitable material by minors.

When you buy yourself an ac-
count with a service provider and
set up your access software, all the
service provider's really doing is
handling all the mundane house-
work involved to connect your
computer and its software to the
vastness of the net. They're not
looking at what you're doing,
they're not screening what you get
or send, they really don't care very
much what goes on as long as you
pay your bills. As the WAIA points

36

AMIGA Review

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Abc Appoints Director O r T elevision

"Hie ^far«fgJttg Director of Ihe AJOC, Brian Johns, today announced

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Jfea tTriftle J

Tb; A£C'.Tra^o.rietwortifor'irp^tie,A l ^Uaiian5.

out, they're more like a phone
company than a newspaper.

Now let's say the tabloids are
right. If service providers are sup-
posed to self-regulate, then they're
expected to stop you getting ques-
tionable stuff. As things stand,
there's simply no sure way they
can do it.

If you're accessing an old-
fashioned bulletin board system
(BBS), as many people still are,
things are different. Post a message
containing bad language or slan-
derous remarks, and you may have
your account deleted. However,
you won't find dubious files unless
the proprietor of the BBS deliber-
ately makes them available for
download.

But Internet service providers
don't, and can't, vet their traffic. If
they're any good, there's far too
much of it, anyway. Another prob-
lem with classifying and censoring
Net traffic is the fact that an essen-

JEtot Cfji p

tial component of Internet commu-
nication is its great speed, A mes-
sage from one side of the planet to
the other via free-access Fidonet
takes days - it's often faster than
air mail, but compared with the
handful of seconds an Internet
communique takes it's an age.
Stick some sort of W. Heath
Robinson pulleys and string classi-
fication engine into the system and
the continuous, mercurial ex-
change of data that makes the In-
ternet what it is will instantly bog
down hopelessly.

And there's more. The WAIA
points out that any accreditation
scheme, which would invariably
involve a significant fee, would be
a big hurdle for service providers
starting out on a shoestring. This
problem already exists for small-
time game software importers;
now that all games have to be vet-
ted by the Office of Film and Liter-
ature Classification in an annoying
and expensive process, anyone

bringing in entertainment software
in a small-business operation either
has to give it up or risk a not in-
considerable busting.

And although it's not quite as
newsworthy as the Internet Ate My
Children stories, it is in fact al-
ready possible for concerned par-
ents to censor their kids', or indeed
their own, net access. Surfwatch
software for IBM compatibles and
Macs avoids anything that looks
immoral (whether or not it actually
is - the automatic filtering Sur-
fwatch uses makes inaccessible,
for example, any Web site with
"sex" in its title...). And, shock
horror, you COULD just keep an
eye on the kids. As I've said be-
fore, the Internet may be disorgan-
ised but it's certainly well labelled.
If you don't walk into sex shops by
accident on your way to the library,
you shouldn't have any trouble
spotting the nasties on the net.

No laws have yet been passed
regarding censorship, and the gov-
ernment does look like it's listen-
ing to people who know more
about the Internet than A Current
Affair and the Telegraph Mirror.

You can contact the WA Inter-
net Association via its spokesper-
son, Kimberley Heitman, at kheit-
man@it.com.au, or on (09) 458
2790.

Incoming!

One of my hobbies (hobby,
noun, pastime on which you spend
a whole load of money for no rea-
son you can articulately explain) is
radio controlled cars. I like radio
controlled cars, because when you
crash them they're generally very

38

AMIGA Review

Top to bottom:

1) Embarrassing Oz culture 1

2) Embarrassing Oz culture 2
3+4) Thank goodness for these

close to the ground already.

Radio controlled aircraft are a
whole 'nother story, and if you
want to read a collection of stories
about what happens when the rub-
ber band lets go at 800 feet and the
prop saws off the antenna, check
out http://www.duke.edu/~tlm7/rc/
crashes.html, a large file of rueful
stories from people who've
watched a thousand bucks and two
months of balsa modelling go
whizz-WHACK.

Incidentally, at http://www.
prairienet org/b us i nes s/to w er/
rcweb.html you'll find a compre-
hensive directory of radio-control
stuff, should you also like making
little annoying motorised things
belt about for no good reason. This
tower directory is actually the Web
site for Tower Hobbies, a Califor-
nian outfit that stocks most every-
thing you could ever want for radio
control and even static modelling,
and has its fuil catalogue online,
with either easy hypertext search-
ing or a single text file version
available for FTP. If you're forms-
capable, you can send orders on-
line, but the usual caveat emptor
rule for sending your credit card
details over unsecured connections
apply. I think the actual chance of
getting your card number ripped
off is pretty remote - you're more
likely to be defrauded the old fash-
ioned way, by an employee of a
company you by from - but given
the ingenuity of online miscreants
it pays to be cautious. Be a rene-

Continued on page 42...

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AM/GA Review

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Super Skidmarks $49

Tower of Souls AGA $69

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Jungle Strike AGA $69

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Death Mask $79

Super Skidmarks $69

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Shadow Fighter $69

Pyramid MIDI Interface..- $69

MegaMix Master Sampler $89

Bars and Pipes 2.5 $389

Music XV2 :. $199

Sunrize AD1012 Card $449

GVP4008 HD Controller $269

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JEC high density floppy $249

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Personal Paint 6.3 $99

Distant Suns 5 $99

Scenery Animator 4 $99

AdorageAGA $149

Image FX v2.1 $399

Deluxe Paint V $99

Easyledgers V2 Now only $299!

Helm $150

ScalaMM400 $399

ScalaEcho $269

Video Director special $99

Dir Opus 5.11 $129

PC Task 3.1 $119

SuperBase Pro 4 vl.3 $299

Disk Expander $49

TypeSmithv2.5 .$199

Power Copy Pro

Power Copy Pro vJkiiii $ 39

■ •-■

_S89
B89

M99

CTITTC

I Wordwortli 3.1 release 2 $149

Wordworth 3.1 Companion $49

Tutorial book packed with helpful ideas
plus bonus clip art & font disk.

Money Matters 3 $79

Datastore $119

Organiser $99

A1200 CD-ROM

Cyber Storm 060

CyberStorm 060 50Mhz ...$2599

Now available for theA4O00.
Trade your existing 040 card.

SCSI II option $399

Amiga Tower Cases

All models include 200 watt power
supply, 5.25 in drive bays and 6 SCSI
Connectors

Case only $219

Case Plus Squirrel $369

Case Plus Squirrel

Plus Quad Speed CD-ROM $749

Case Plus Squirrel Plus 540Mb
Quantum SCSI HD $699

Call for a quote on a system with

alternative SCSI interfaces and tailored

to your needs.

CD ROM Titles

Aminet 7 $35

Aminet Set 1-4 $69

Prima Shareware Vol 1 $39

Meeting Pearls 2 $49

Lightwave Enhancer $129

Multimedia Toolkit V2 $69

Ten on Ten $89

Sony/Panasonic CD-ROM

Quad Speed SCSI Internal $399

Quad Speed SCSI External $549

Workbench 3.1 Upgrades SCall

Now back in stock!

Vidi Amiga Digitisers

Vidi Amiga 12 .$169

Vidi Amiga 24 RT $349

Vidi Amiga 24 RT Pro $499

Scanners & DTP

Alfa Scan 800 with OCR $339

PageStream 3.h $399

Espon GT9000 $1349

A600 1MB RAM with clock $149

A500 1/2MB RAM with clock $69

Alfa Power A500 HD controller... $199
with 2MB RAM & 40MB HD $449

Multisync 1438 $799

Displays all Amiga modes

Cloanto Personal Suite CD

Coming in late September is this
fine collection of software i i.iL.i i
on one CD-ROM.
Personal Write
Classic Animations
Kara Fonts, Clip Art
Personal Font Maker
Personal Paint'6.3 Enhanced
Superbase Personal 4 from OXXI
Available from Amadeus or your
local Amiga Dealer

Quantum SCSI 2ND

540Mb $349

850Mb $529

1.08Gb $699

Seagate IDE HD

200Mb 2.5in $299

520Mb 2.5in $599

420Mb 3.5 in $299

540Mb 3.5in $349

850Mb 3.5 in SPECIAL $399

1.08Gb 3.5 in $549

•!>jad Speed External
—• e plus Squirrel

$699

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30 Day Money Back Guarantee. We accept Bankcan
Visa, Mastercard and AMEX. Cheque, Money Order,
Direct deposit or COD. Lay-By also available.

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Lit

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I —

Point of Sale

For the Amiga

By Daniel Rutter

I A new Australian program called
Poswiz aims to put the Amiga on
the front counter of many stores.
Poswiz is a retail point of sate, in-
ventory and marketing program. A
small retailer could save around
$2000 off the price of an equiva-
lent IBM based system thanks to
the lower cost of the software, and
cheaper hardware needed to run it.
Poswiz will work nicely on an un-
expanded A1200. Most IBM sys-
tems require a hefty 486.

It works by letting you enter
your stock and who supplies it.
The program handles the sales and
ordering. Poswiz considers stock
management and sales more im-
portant than accounting. Stock is
where your money is, so to man-
age your money, you need to man-
age your stock,

Poswiz is not an accounting
package. You can't print a trial
balance, for example. All it looks
after is stock, customers and sup-
pliers. This might sound limiting,
but when you consider this in-
cludes sales, ordering, deliveries,
payments, history, and reporting, it
covers almost everything a typical
retailer needs.

You can enter over 30,000 dif-
ferent lines with multiple suppliers
for each - that's more than the av-
erage Woolworths store! The same
goes for your suppliers and cus-
tomers.

Stock can be organised in sev-
eral different ways. Each item be-
longs simultaneously to a depart-
ment, a product range and a group.
These divisions allow you to
record sales information according
to physical location, brand name
and target age group. As each de-
partment, range and group also has
a discount, you can have a sale on
all items of a certain brand name
or department by Changing a single
setting.

For larger or expensive items,
the program can track serial num-
bers, so you can find out what
items are in the store and who
bought what and when. You can
list the serial numbered items pur-
chased by any particular customer.

Suppliers and Ordering

The program lets you enter all
your suppliers' details and create
and print orders to them. Suppli-
er's name, address and contact de-

tails are recorded, along with up to
three phone numbers. As several
suppliers can supply the same
item, there's a function for enter-
ing the ordering details for each
item, from each supplier. You can
enter the different ways the stock
is supplied and select one supplier
as the preferred one for an item.
These details are used when the
program generates stock orders, to
determine the best supplier to or-
der from.

Poswiz lets you create orders
automatically or manually, then
edit them before printing. The au-
tomatic ordering function features
a comprehensive set of controls to
make sure that the program only
orders what is required. You can
tailor the process to order only cer-
tain items, decide the best supplier
for each, and set a budget limit on
the total order.

Customers and Sales

Customers can be entered if
you want to use the layby and ac-
count sales functions. The program
actually allows for multiple laybys
and invoices per customer. Sales
are made using a cash register win-

Con fined on page 57 . . ,

AMIGA Review

43

■iaiPD

By
DunM

3 < I > I ^3

RotPatch &&

Here's this month's Destroy
Someone's Life program. It's a
ROT13 patcher.

ROT13, for them as don't
know, is the simple alphabetic ro-
tation of all letters by 13 charac-
ters, wrapping around at the ends,
So, in ROT13, hello world be-
comes uryyb jbeyq. It's a simple
pseudo-code, easy to decode but
difficult to read, and is hence com-
monly used for encoding possibly
offensive text or hiding puzzle so-
lutions.

RotPatch, however, ROT13's
all your system text. Icons, screen
titles, menus, you name it. Every- '
thing still works exactly the same
way it did before, it's just illegible.
As I believe I've said before, I'm
sure you know someone who de-
serves this,

Masterblaster &

Another DynaBlasters clone.
Imitation sincerest form of flattery,
and all that. If you've never played
a DynaBlasters game, get out
more. Square grid, bricks, bombs.
Bombs blast to four cardinal com-
pass directions, break bricks, kill

people, range of blast and number
of bombs droppable at once varies
depending on powerups. Various
other powerups. Up to five players
with one of them four player joy-
stick adapter things.

Simple. Fun.

This take on the concept fea-
tures extra powerups including re-
mote-controllable bombs (chase
the other guy around with 'em!), a
shop for extra bonuses in between
levels, and an annoying sound-
track.

MernDoubler &ft&

A stupid program, but fun.
MernDoubler is one of those things
that shows up on a BBS with the
file description "Double your
RAM for nothing!" and gets down-
loaded by a roughly equal mix of
chumps and people who just want
to see what the heck it is.

What it is is a hack to fool the
system into thinking it's got more
RAM. It hasn't, but it thinks it has
- right up until it tries to USE that
extra RAM.

You can multiply your fast and
chip RAM separately, by up to a

Right: Rotpatch, Incredibly
annoying,

Program complexity

ik Oprah viewers
Hk'i Melrose addicts
Otikik Roseanne-ites
ikikikik Anything by
Dennis Potter

factor of 10. Nothing actually
seems to crash when it tries to use
nonexistent RAM - it just LOOKS
as if there's more memory when
you do an Avail or check the
memory display on Workbench.
But it'd certainly confuse the heck
out of someone if hidden in their
startup. Not, of course, that I advo-
cate... oh, who am I fooling?

Art of Rocketry *

I'm a sucker for a Thrust game,
and here's another one. The Art of
Rocketry is a nicely designed
though somewhat fiddly one or
two player little-ships-in-a-maze
game, with a selection of oddly
named ships which cost different
amounts and have different rocket
thrust, mass, fuel and cargo capaci-
ties, missile loads and guns.

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44

AMIGA Review

AM

SHAREWARE

Top: The Art of Rocketry
Below: Bratwurst - it looks
much cooler in motion.

There are deviously designed
levels, things to pick up, hostile
scenery, homing missiles - all the
usuals. If it weren't for bits of
sloppy coding, like the way you
can stick your ship inside a wall
and die, it'd be excellent.

This is just the demo version of
the full registered game, which has
a couple more ships, a level editor
and more groovy stuff; check it
out on the companion disks and
see if you like it.

UnLock &&&

A simple, tiny program. Now
and then you want to delete some-
thing, and find you can't, because
some dumb program's put a Lock
on it and not removed it when it
finished with it. It's usually an as-
sign or CD or something that's had
its head cut off and now can't be
easily killed. There are two ways
to deal with this problem; reboot,
or use a system monitor program
like, for example, the monster
Scout I reviewed last month, to kill
the lock manually. UnLock is a
weeny utility whose main purpose
is killing off unwanted locks; you
can also use it to show you what
locks currently exist. You can
even kill locks according to a
wildcard pattern, if you like.

Tiny, useful, on the companion
disks. You need Workbench 2 to
run Unlock.

OK**

Very small program. Displays
simple hour-minute- second timer

(On Line Timer, hence name) in
little bar on Workbench. ARexx
port with not many commands. No
other significant functions. On
companion disks. Not worth more
text than this.

Bratwurst &

I mentioned this oddly named
Thrust-ish multiplayer combat
game a couple of months ago, and
it's been updated. The changes

aren't revolutionary - there are
more ships and some of the old
ships have some new guns. Yon
still need an AGA machine to play
it, and it's still great fun - especial-
ly if you have more than two play-
ers.

Three's good, four's insane. I
said plenty about this game last
time, and it's now a bit better. On
the companion disks.

AMIGA Review

45

hmmcmimis

.continued from page 39

gade like me - stay up till three in
the morning and call them. They're
ever so amused when you quote a
four digit postcode.

Web hotels

Rydges Hotel Group is the
largest Australian owned and man-
aged hotel group in the country,
with a collection of hotels here and
in New Zealand. They also now
have a website, at http://www.
world.net/rydges/. The website lets
you look at pictures and highly
complimentary descriptions of Ry-
dges hotels, and you can leave
your own feedback or even make a
credit card reservation online - if
you're brave enough to tell the
world your card number, of course.

At the moment, many hotels
don't have descriptions available,
but as a forerunner of the web-
linked business paradise people
keep saying is just around the cor-
ner, this is pretty good.

Online Aussie mall!

The Shop Australia Mall at ht-
tp://www,ozemail,com.au:80/gday/
contains a plethora of things dis-
tinctively Australian at discounted
prices, and you can buy online
with Mastercard or Visa or, more
sanely, call a phone order line.

There certainly is a fine selec-
tion of things Australia is known
for, even if we're not at all sure we
want to be. In the various virtual
shops you'll find Driza- Bones,
moleskins, Akubra hats, leather
goods (of which more later...),
Rugby gear, surfboards, items pro-
moting locally brewed amber flu-
ids, opals, golf tours, gourmet
(read - peculiar) food, contact lens-
es, jewellery, adventure holidays
and the suddenly hip yet, many
would agree, generally loathsome
UGG boot.

I feel the need for a brief edito-
rial at this point.

Now, I know some people who
wear UGG boots. My mother is
among them. But they have the de-
cency to wear them when slopping
about at home. UGG boots may be
comfy, they may be warm, but they
are NOT fashion accessories. They
are NOT cool. Along with purple
Monaros, skintight vinyl and the
Bee Gees, they are artifacts of a
bygone age whose time has most
definitely passed. Australia got
over them in the late 70s and I for
one was happy to see them go. I do
NOT need to see any more pictures
of Pamela Anderson wearing them.
Thank you.

Just the same, good luck to the
bloke who makes 'em. Anyone
who can make a fortune out of
making Americans look like idiots
is all right with me.

Joining the fabulous UGG
products in the "things that
shouldn't exist" category is one of
the products on sale in the leather
goods store. It is a small leather
pouch, such as one might use for
storing coins or tobacco. It is gen-
erally unremarkable in appearance,
except for the fact that it has no
seams.

This is because it is made from
a kangaroo scrotum. The entry
tastefully notes that the size of the
pouch depends on the size of the
donor 'roo.

I don't doubt they'll sell as
many of these things as they can
make, but is this really the image
we as a nation wish to project to
the world's online shoppers? Dag-
gy boots and genital leather?

While I'm complaining, might
1 mention that visitors to these sites
may get the impression that
Australians can't spell or punctuate
very well. The text for all of the
items has been proofed poorly -
and a misspelled catalogue is not
impressive.

Aside from the various simple

typos, you'll be pleased to know
that the rather expensive handmade
bridle leather Plainsman briefcase
comes with "a three year guarantee
against workmanship." That's
right, you get all your money back
if you find any workmanship in
this product.

The mall site's really aimed at
them foreign chaps, with prices
listed in US dollars and a free 1800
number for callers from the States.
But if you're embarrassed to buy
one of those distinctive coin
pouches over the counter, or
hanging out for a tubular zip-up
receptacle for six cans of beer, or
like the look of the rather tasteful
Pierre Car din opal-faced watches
which may indeed be cheaper than
in the stores, this is a handy online
catalogue no matter where you
live.

ABC Online

At http://www.abc.net.au/

you'll find ABC Online, your link
to all the branches of the Aus-
tralian Broadcasting Corporation,
their programs, their activities and
their products.

The only ABC TV areas are
dedicated to the Hot Chips com-
puter program and Behind The
News, the current affairs program
for schoolkids - the site's real em-
phasis at present is radio.

ABC Classic FM, Radio Na-
tional, Radio Australia and JJJ FM
get their own areas, with JJJ's be-
ing predictably the liveliest. The
JJJ pages contain a variety of inter-
esting and peculiar areas - offbeat
online comics, an exhaustive list of
the ever growing J Wear catalogue,
info on hot new music and compi-
lations on the JJJ record label, and
plenty more. Check it out.

□

EMAIL NEWS to
pcreview@world.net

42

AMIGA Review

PD&

u

jnterCl-BfcB

Tooltypes £ ; file !nfb \ Icon Info \

oxe

Si 0wri

v I

Save! , ■ , ^rtte . . Cidse ■]• Quit ■

Above: At last - a nice info
window.

8n1. device***

The Amiga serial. device, %s
used by default by anything doing
serial communications, is a won-
derful thing.

It has so many options. Options
few people use, like XON/XOFF
handshaking, parity, odd numbers
of data and stop bits. In the olden
days, settings other than eight data
bits, no parity, one stop bit (8nl)
were common, but today they only
survive on a few proprietary sys-
tems - CompuServe and sundry
corporate lines.

If you call a bulletin board, you
use Snl and maybe RTS/CTS
handshaking, and that's all you
need, so that's all 8nl.de vice sup-
ports.

The idea is to make a serial de-
vice with as little extra going on as
possible, to get minimum system
overhead. Unless you're using a
very fast modem and a very slow
Amiga you won't notice faster
transfers with a new serial device,
but you will notice less system
slowdown.

I tried Snl. device out, and it

worked; the difference in CPU
time used isn't all that noticeable
on a fast machine, but if you're
running a 68000 or slow 020 ma-
chine with a fast modem (14,400
or 28,800 Bps) you'll feel the dif-
ference.

There is one shortcoming,
though, for people with DMA hard
disk controllers (ye olde GVP Se-
ries n, for example) which cause
serial errors on disk access unless
you use a patcher program to
choke back the controller when the
serial device is in use. Snl. device
doesn't seem to be patchable. You
have been warned. It's on the com-
panion disks, anyway.

Giga.device ****

Another new and exciting de-
vice, this time for owners of Enor-
mous Hard Drives. If you have a
drive bigger than 4Gb and you're
trying to use it as an ordinary Ami-
gaDOS device, you'll note that it
doesn't work properly. This is be-
cause AmigaDOS can only handle
4Gb of RAM (rather a lot) and
4Gb of disk space on each drive
(still rather a lot, but possible to
exceed nowadays). Partitioning
won't help - it's a device level
problem.

Giga.device is a quick and dirty
workaround for the problem. It sits
on top of your SCSI device and
carves the drive up into chunks of
up to 4 Gb, which can be dealt with
as separate devices.

Provided your SCSI device
supports SCSI direct commands,
almost everything should work
with giga.device drives, although
apparently the free space indicators
go bananas. Interestingly, it ap-
pears that in the olden days of
AmigaDOS, drive offsets, and
hence maximum sizes, were de-
fined as longwords, not the present
ulongword.

What this means in English
was that hard drives for early Ami-
gaDOSes could be from 2Gb to

minus 2Gb. To my knowledge, no-
body has ever sold a drive with
less than no capacity.

Old software that still thinks
drives can only be 2Gb in size will
still screw up, but everything else
should work. Hey, it's worth a try,

Giga.device is shareware, with
the registered version allowing you
to use your big drive at an address
other than 0. As the author quite
reasonably says, if you can afford
a hard drive bigger than 4Gb you
can also afford to send him a bit of
cash - he suggests $US5 per giga-
byte.

Jouster 3 *

Ah, Joust. Now there's a game.
Flapping around on a bird, knock-
ing other guys off" their birds, col-
lecting eggs, avoiding lava. A clas-
sic in the arcades, a classic on Ap-
ple II and other dino-PCs, and now
a quite good version of a classic on
the Amiga.

This version of Joust doesn't
feel as good as the Apple II con-
version, in my humble opinion; it's
a tad jerky and you can fly off the
top of the screen. But there are all
the original features and power-ups
and -downs too, not to mention a
two player mode (hat lets you play
as a team on some levels and
against each other on others, so it's
still worth having.

If you wouldn't mind playing a
Real Game for a change from these
million colour virtual reality total
immersion experiences the kids
seem to like so much these days,
then give it a go.

The only problem with Jouster
3 is it's huge - too big for a floppy
- thanks to the two giant and not
terribly good looking animations
included for the intro and help
screen. So I've put it on a separate
disk with a hard disk installer. Or-
der it as "Jouster 3".

46

AMIGA Review

Clockwatcher A**

Every now and then a game, or
some other odd program, will
stomp your battery backed clock's
settings. You will then, traditional-
ly, go about your business for a
day or so before noticing your ma-
chine is littered with files that
think they were made in 1978.

Programs to notice odd clock
settings aren't a new idea, but this
is an elegant one; just put it in your
startup and it'll tell you if the time
is apparently earlier than the last
time it was started, or a definable
number of days later; if some-
thing's wrong, you can reset the
clock from a simple interface.

CloneClock AAA

Still on the subject of confused
clocks, here's a little program for
people with a couple of Amigas
hooked up with Parnet, the slow
but cheap parallel networking sys-
tem. It lets you easily set the clock
of one machine from the other.
That's about it. The program is
about as tiny as this description, so
it's on the companion disks.

Extralnfo A*

The Workbench Information
window is not great. Dodgy layout,
no keyboard shortcuts, no easy
way to cut, copy and paste
tooltypes settings - and it paralyses
Workbench while it's up.

Extralnfo is a program that
tries to get around this problem. It
doesn't patch the Information
menu item - if you choose that,
you still gel the same old display -
but it does let you pick a file to get

info on from a file requester or,
more usefully, use an Applcon
(that's right, WB2+ only) so you
can just drag an icon onto the Ap-
plcon and be in business,

When the Extralnfo window's
open you can, of course, just drag
fresh icons in there instead, and the
bit of window you drop them on
determines whether they're loaded
as a new icon for display or if their
name's put into a gadget, or their
image used to replace the current
one.

Extralnfo provides a total of
four possible "pages" of modi-
fiable information for an icon, de-
pending on what sort of icon it is.
There are pages for tooltypes, file
info, volume info and icon info.

There are a few functions not
present in the standard Information

window - easy colour remapping
and depth changing, file version
and type identification (using
whatis.library, which out of the
kindness of my heart I've added to
the version of Extralnfo on the
companion disks), position rai-
snapping, even independent access
flag setting for multi-user filesys-
tems, I can't honestly say the
lousiness of the standard Informa-
tion window has damaged my life
noticeably, but Extralnfo 's worth-
while nonetheless.

Buy! Buy! Buy!

All of the software mentioned
in this article, except for the rather
large Jouster 3, is on the compan-
ion disks. They're called Hot-
PD27a and b, and you can have
them for $9.50 including postage
from Prime Artifax on 1800 252
879. If you want louster 3 as well,
it'll be $13.50 altogether; Jouster 3
by itself is $5.

Call now - stocks are strictly
limited by the number of disks that
can be pushed through the copying
machines.

Right: Masterblaster - Done
before, but done well here.

.AMIGA Review

47

12 ProPdge Tips

Work faster and smarter

By Andrew Far rel I

I It is no secret we publish two
monthly magazines using Profes-
sional Page - the other magazine is
Australian PC Review. We're still
trying to work out how to break it
to all those PC clone users out
there that they're favourite maga-
zine is created using an Amiga.
Anyhow, after years of pumping
out pages, we figured we could
come up with twenty good tips on
how to make Professional Page
sing.

1. If you have 2Mb of chip
memory, and you're working on an
A4 page, use the Preferences,
Screen Mode option to select a
screen sized 800 x 950. With this
setting you'll enjoy the benefits of
a virtual screen that you can scroll
around in an instant.

(see figure 1)

2. Select your magnification
level to 100% and you'll be able to
see and read an entire A4 page,

3. Make sure interruptable re-
fresh (under Preferences) is ticked
- you can tick multiple items by
clicking the left mouse button as

you move up and down a menu
with the right mouse button held
down. In this mode of operation, if
a page is refreshing and you don't
want to wait, just hit space or acti-
vate the menu you require.

4. For making text corrects on a
page with a lot of other graphics,
fills and the like - switch wire-
frames on under preferences and
select black and white mode. This
will increase the refresh speed, and
the Amiga always runs quicker

with less colours being displayed
(unless you're using a 24- bit
graphics card).

5. There's a few basic short
cuts worth learning - you'll see
them on the pull down menus. But
be careful - highlighted text will be
replaced with whatever key you
press if it's not a short cut.

6. Press ESC to UNDO any ac-
cidental changes.

sional Fa9c IM.1 ST)93 Gold Bisk Inc.

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12 ProFage Tips

By Andrew fiarr#ll

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bi-Blioj/ r}££"* -roloa etetlc-^;

Wl!' 4|>J Riil In.-:] rj.u'l f/ft*ia

Vs^

Fig1

48

AMIGA Review

~ =;_:: ;

7. If you pick up a box by mis-
take and start to move it, press
ESC while you're still holding trie
mouse button or even after you've^
dropped the box to return it to the
original position.

8. Hot key text out into Tran-
swrite for editing. (Amiga /) . If
text seems to be misbehaving, use
the show Ppage codes menu option
and then edit out any codes. Hot
key the text back and try again.

(see figure 2)

9. Why stick to IFF? If you
need black and white photographs,
(since ProPage 4.1 will bomb im-
porting 8-bit IFF images) convert
them to GIF using Art Depart-
ment! GIF is by far the most re-
liable file format in ProPage -
don't ask why, just use it.

10. Use the load and save page
option to copy elements between
different folios. (But be careful,
loading a page will bring all the
style tags and colour settings with
it.)

11. Get the AREXX Genies in
our Public Domain software li-
brary - they'll save you a stack of
time for tiling business cards, la-
bels, outputting a lot of files to
postscript, copy pages, fitting a
bitmap to a box and a whole stack
more.

(see figure 3)

Fig2

^?Praf7!

7TT

ili ?!.■*.■

lt-te ne t&trsi *e pahUift two Ktnl^v n*diTint uiir^ Pratessi&nal Pag* -
tht other isq^T^fH i: ^uiLf-il :j' ? l fciuni. Ue J re stuL trnrtg t& POfK nn!
ncu Ec Sr?*i: it \n i-A lli^c =\ l .lil -...:i . jl: ". ion- '111 rhpv'-e
UvUuri^ iw? \r* is irt^sd lei >•- =n Nim^. ilf-vligi,, j'f. I ' "r? '■'
■juhfiivj ad- pan-Ps. -j? hn^d -; ;cu\t| tai* # uith Lug.^ gcDJ tips m tis&i
tfl Hats PrftEtisittui Fa^P 5<rvs*1

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c«fi kiuSI amend tft ai Uslat. 1

2. 'Ssltct y(fflr qaimF kjtiwi LtUfl to IMS ■;
r*»d ar. rot eh fit psge.l

3j rllllt vote iaftrriiPtJlll r^-^rprh :-jnder- r"^-eter-enc.E;s i is LUkti ■■ yoi fj?
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ttatJi d ntrrtl Ultt 1 thfl f inhf *i3ii=f h.rtcn h?U dcu^. ir- X\tii hd<=e ni
gpef-iUgii, if a pjm is ref rfsBnaa -nf vaa doa k E u-snt in *iait h Jusi hit
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3

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mi thf lite - sj.t:h
i.rr.^:- ni-li. iN= u ,t
■wicker uttn fiiS Hi
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r*LCs ■:

is the rpfPS-i'i s£t5d, in; th* ill'.ijJ JihjVS n. n."S
n:ii :li>piiMb (L-!i.ti£ t:n'i? uiirg; a- ft-b.E

tts^

I fasc Cp 1 STTJ3 "fi« ( d Disk. Inc.

'I .'I .°1 ,1 .1 .'I ,-l ,°l ,H ."I ■"! ■"» ."I ■"! ."I ."I > IT 1 ^ ■"! ■"! "I "

12 ProPage Tips

x

Ey Andrew Fairell

Fi InSPnTtolour
F indRmlftcp1*c#

I i Ifli lnii.^TuBoxc=

antTofloxes

SetTiggcdTtWt

i.'ii tfkBoxes
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s

Keys

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3 I 'woft i

a*nt tui.i-mil, ^Bthil ipK* tf iitti-

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jni (turn adjl rsH «iv CriM Tfcl
.'■:; -fc *~ tori: iri r,if jzi

fig 3

12, If you need your files out-
put to FILM or BROMIDE, use
Access Graphics - they have a very
souped up Amiga 4000 networked
directly to an Imagesetter. The

number to call is (02) 550 4499.
They accept Amiga disks, Syquest
44, 88 or 270 and modem trans-
fers.

□

ZIP 100Mb external SCSI removable HD $399
Including 2 free 100Mb disks

Seagate/WD/Quantum/Maxtor IDE harddrives Call

Quantum 540Mb/730Mb/S50Mb SCSMI $339/379/419

Quantum 1 .08Gb/2.1Gb/4.3Gb SCSI-1! $619/1259/1799

SyQuest 270Mb SCSI-II 3.5 " removeable $580

SyQuest 270Mb cartridge $110

Bernoulli 230Mb SCSI-II removeable 4 cartridge $799

SCSI external mini box incl. cable $150

A1200 Pyramide RCA and 020/28Mhz TRA Call

Rombo and VIDI Amiga Products Call
Sony CDU-76s Quad speed SCSI-II CD-ROM drive $389

Maestro V34 28.8k Fax modemf GPFax cable $489

CD32 Paravision SX1 $389

A1200 DKB 1202 $149

A1200 DKB 1202/20Mhz $189

A1200 DKB£obra 68030/28Mhz $269

A1200 DKB Cobra 68030/40Mhz $399

A1200 DKB Mongoose 68030/50Mhz inc. co-pro $599

A1200 Mongoose/Cobra SCSI-II controller S 1 75

A2000 Accelerators Call

Electronic Design Genlocks Calf

Phone for our best price on all AMIGA and PC hardware

Fonhof Computer Supplies

64 Cross St, Baulkham Hills, NSW 2153
Phone (02) 639 7718 Fax (02) 639 5995

AMIGA Review

49

CD

ROI

:'.

Amine

the saga continues

By Daniel Rutter

> After all these updates, there's
not a lot more I can say about what
is uncontestably the premier
Amiga freely distributable soft-
ware collection on CD-ROM. Lots
of stuff, up to date, and very easy
to access thanks to the best inter-
face in the business. The Aminet
discs are now officially coming out
every two months, and there's
about 650Mb of new software on
Aminet 7, which carries an August
release date.

Loads of pictures

Every Aminet disc has a focus
area, and for this one it's images.
You get all the usual new Aminet
image uploads, but there are also a
load of 24 bit JPGs on various sub-
jects - animals, sports, vehicles,
scenery - and more than 8000 high
grade black and white IFF clip art
images. There's also a large selec-
tion of high grade astronomical
images - pictures of assorted rock-
ets, tons of Voyager pics, pictures
of and from the Hubble Space
Telescope and so on.

The clip art covers every cate-
gory under the sun. Each catego-
ry's one big archive, and you Can

view individual images out of it
via the usual nicely linked Ami-
gaguide interface.

If you want this to work prop-
erly, though - for example, if you
want to use the nice PicZoo
thumbnail image database - you
need Workbench 3, and preferably
AGA. I got along on my humble
WB2.1 machine by using the PD
package ArcHandler, which makes
archives behave like directories,
making the clip art easy to view
without endless archive bashing.

In a first for Aminet discs, you
also get some commercial software
- a fully functional version of Per-
sonal Paint 2.1. This is the 1993
edition, which has NOT been
released into the public domain
and may NOT be used by anyone

who's not bought Aminet 7.
There's also a demo version of the
current 6,3 incarnation of Personal
Paint, which stamps "demo" all
over anything you save or print but
is otherwise fully functional and an
excellent advertisement for Deluxe
Paint's premier competitor.

There's aiso the full version of
PPrint, a low-end desktop publish-
ing program, originally commer-
cial, which is deeply mystifying to
anyone who doesn't speak its na-
tive German. Hey, worth what you
pay - about four and a half cents,
judging by the proportion of the
CD it takes up.

Weird stuff

As always, there are some
bizarre new inclusions that just go
to show what happens when you
make a software collection essen-
tially uncensored. To gel a file on-
to Aminet, it just needs to be a
non-corrupt archive with no virus-
es in it and a description file. So
while, strictly speaking, Aminet is
only for Amiga stuff, theoretically
anything can be included.

So you get a series of pictures
of some Amiga sysop's hot '68

50

AMIGA Review

ROM

Camaro dragster, and a load of
"silly stories" which are all very
badly written and mainly trying to
be erotic in some sad resisted
schoolboy sort of way. The sexy
content consists almost exclusively
of putting the word "erotic" in the
title, though; if they were being
sold commercially, you could do
the author for misleading advertis-
ing. Have no fear for your chil-
dren; I know what porn looks like,
and this is definitely not it.

One omission that annoyed me
are the updates for the Internet
Movie Database, which is
available in an offline form on the
Meeting Pearls 2 CD (and re-
viewed in the July 1995 issue).
Updates to this mighty movie
database come out weekly, and
they're rather large, and you need
them all in sequence for the patch-
es to work. 1 saw them on Aminet
online, but they're so huge that 1
couldn't be bothered grabbing
them, since I can access the Inter-
net Movie Database on the Web
anyway. I was looking forward to
getting 'em all on this CD, but
none of them are there, and there's
no explanation why.

Improvements

The Aminet Find tool's been
improved - you can now do multi-
ple word searches, which will only
match if both words are in an en-
try. There's a dedicated clip art
finder tool, you can look at single
files from archives, and Work-
bench 3 users can easily convert
JPG images into IFF.

Glitches

There are always a few glitches
on an Aminet CD, especially in ar-
eas like those pesky demos - al-
ways tricky to start automatically
from an archive. This one's no ex-
ception, but Aminet 7 seems to
have more than its fair share of
problems, with a few Amigaguide
glitches on WB2.X machines

Aminet 7's got a pile of pics of interesting places.

AMIGA Review

51

CD

ROM

Lots of groovy space pics on Aminet 7 too.

(WB3 users won't notice it), more
misconnected buttons than usual
and similar minor boo-boos, It's
still a great interface, and the im-
provements are good, but they've •
brought an unusually large flock of
bugs with them too.

Still, even with its flaws, this is
an excellent CD-ROM and worth
buying whether or not you've got
Aminet 6. There's not much over-
lap between the Aminet single dis-
cs, and if you keep up with the se-
ries you've got just about every-
thing worth having in Amiga
freely distributable software. For
$35, it's a steal.

52

AMIGA Review

ROM

Prima

another
smorgasbord

J

The Prima Amiga Shareware 1
Volume 1 CD-ROM is a smorgas-
bord-disc, like the Meeting Pearls
series. There's pictures, programs,
animations, sound samples, fonts,
you name it, and it's all unar-
chived, which is bad because you
get half as much but good because
it's much easier to access the data
on the disc with all sorts of pro-
grams without eating your bard
disk space. Even with all the care
in the world, an archive disc like
any of the Aminet series will strike
problems when auto-extraction
software doesn't work with a given
oddball program.

Another good thing about
smorgasbord discs is that if you
don't have much of a CD-ROM
collection, one of them'll keep you
going for a fair while for not much
money. But another bad thing is
that they're always killed in any
given department by a disc dedi-
cated to that department.

Programs

In the PD department, the
Prima disc's blown into the weeds
by Aminet, partly because it
doesn't have nearly as much stuff,
partly because it's harder to find
software (there's no nifty universal
search facility, just a lumpen file
finder), and partly because it's out
of date - the newest files are
November 1994, and the oldest
ones are antiques. Mind you,
among those antiques are plenty of
Eric Schwartz animations and sim-

ilar show-off files all Amiga users
should have, but if you've already
got a collection of old animations
from one of the many other discs
on which they appear, this will not
excite you.

Pictures

The Prima disc has a pile of
images on it in HAM, HAM-8 and
24 bit formats, with most of the
high-colour images also supplied
as low-res HAM renders for users
of proletarian Amigas. Low-res
lace would have been nice, but you
can't have everything. There are a
few Photo CD format images, as
well, but the high point is a big
collection of liarlh -from -space im-
ages; there are some miscellaneous
pics of shuttle launches and heav-
enly bodies, but most of the pics
are of bits of our planet from a
long long way up and they're ex-
cellent - if you like that sort of
thing. This collection actually har-
ly overlaps with the one on Aminet
7; if you get both of them, they
complement each other.

Other stuff

There's a reasonable music col-
lection, though nothing like as
much as you'll find on Aminet; the
collections suffers from not com-
ing with a decent player (just an
old version of Multiplayer), and
from being misnamed - there are
SoundTracker MODs labeled as
MED modules and vice versa. De-
cent filler material, but nothing
more.

Less decent filler material is a
handful of demos of commercial
software, none of it new enough to
be particularly interesting. I liked
the demo of a model plane simula-
tion package, but everything else
was old bat - some of it old enough
to be un buy able.

Rescuing the disc is a fair col-
lection of fonts - 742 Postscript
ones, 113 Pro Page type scalables
and 5 80- odd IntelliFoni Compu-

Graphic. There are many duplicate
fonts in the different formats, but if
you're searching for a pretty big
spread of scalable fonts, this ain't
bad.

No contest?

Prima is a 570Mb CD-ROM,
and it sells for $39. If you're after
space pictures, fonts, and a decent
collection of not specially new
freely distributable software, it's
an OK deal. If the Aminet discs
didn't exist, I'd recommend it. But
Aminet 7, as always, is chock-a-
block full at about 650Mb, com-
pressed, or a heck of a lot more un-
compressed; it's got more music
on it than Prima and a load of
space pics of its own, it's easier to
access in many cases, and it costs
only $35. 1 know what I'd buy.

Contact Amadeus Computers
on (02) 651 1711 for more infor-
mation.

A couple of the space
pictures on the Prima disc.

AMIGA Review

53

Almath
Ten On Ten

Are ten CDs for $89 really a barg

By Daniel Rutter

► You've probably seen one or
another in the series of 5 Foot Ten
Packs for IBM compatible ma-
chines - 10 CD-ROMs of varying
quality at bargain basement prices.
It's a concept that's been quite
widely imitated, and now there's
an Amiga version, which comes
from Almathera and gives you 10
Amiga CD-ROM titles for $89. On
the face of it, less than $9 a disc
looks like a pretty good deal - but
is it?

The ten discs come in card-
board sleeves, arranged in a rain-
bow of colours, and they're all
packaged in another cardboard
slipcover. Full points for not wast-
ing packing material. They are, in
order, Comms & Networking, CD-
PD 1 and 2, Demo 1, World Vista
Atlas, Illustrated Works of Shake-
speare, Pandora's CD. Team Yan-
kee, Photo Library and Clipart and
Fonts.

Almathera Comms &
Networking CD

This first disc contains a load
of communications-related soft-
ware, and some manuals for other
discs.

You get the terminal program
Terminus, Parnet and Sernet for
hooking Amigas up to each other
(useful for connecting your CDTV
or CD32 to a "real" Amiga}, and
there are several installs of the 4.0
demo version of AmiTCP, for easy
operation on a wide variety of net-
working systems. There are also

several Amiga Mosaic installs,
likewise easy to get going, and
one's set up for use with no net-
work, so you can just use it for
viewing HTML format hypertext
files locally.

There's sundry other software
on this disk - text, games, Amiga
Report issues up to 3.09, various
handy utilities everyone should
have and so on.

If you've got a CDTV or
CD32, you have to use the Net-
working CD to load any of the oth-
er CDs, because only this first disk
has the CD32 boot code on it (to
save on licensing fees). Boot with
the right mouse button/blue con-
troller pad button down and you're
away. On SX-1 equipped CD32s
or otherwise CD-bootable ma-
chines, this isn't necessary.

CDPD1

This is the CD that first made
Almathera's name - but that was,
unfortunately, rather a while ago.
It's a freely distributable software
compilation, with Fred Fish disks
1-660 and a fair number of elderly
MOD music files. You get King-
fisher to browse the Fish and Pro-
Tracker and Noiseplayer for the
MODs, but nothing can get away
from the fact that this disc's as old
as the hills.

CDPD2

Predictably, not as old as CD-
PD 1, but still very old and not
very useful. It adds another 100
Fish disks plus 220 disks from the
less successful Scope library, plus

AMIGA Review

ROM

Right: Plenty of
cool pics on the Photo
Library disc

150Mb of archives from the old
AB20 Internet Amiga software
archive, which was eaten up by
Arriinet lo these many years past,
and a bit of other stuff. Historical
interest only for the vast bulk of
Amiga users.

Demo 1

Demos, demos, demos. And,
stunningly, not very new demos ei-
ther. I tried a half dozen of them,
spent ten minutes making a couple
of them run, and gave up. If you're
interested in antique demos, you
probably already have this disc
anyway.

Fortunately, the disc also has a
few games of middle vintage, a
few fonts and clip art images, and
another version of the Classic Ani-
mation Collection that so many
Amiga CD-ROMs seem to include.
If you don't already have a CD
with all of the Eric Schwartz ani-
mations, the Tobias Richter stuff
and similar oldies, this is worth-
while by itself.

There are also a lot of MODs
on this disc, which I'd classify as
60% average, 10% good, 30%
lousy.

World Vista Atlas

An early and not especially fa-
mous CDTV atlas program, World
Vista is far from exhaustive but
ain't useless either.

The content's not bad, consid-
ering what you pay - a load of ugly
digitised maps, a load of much bet-
ter digitised pictures, and quite a
lot of sound samples which are

UGA Review

55

CD

ROM

Above: The World Vista pics
aren 't bad for their age.

rather arbitrary in what they repre-
sent from each country but are well
enough done nonetheless. As well
as samples of typical music, you
can hear a selection of common
phrases in plenty of different lan-
guages.

In line with its vintage, all of
the pictures are only low res laced
HAM6, but they look OK on a
composite monitor or TV and tol-

erable on a proper monitor. Hey,
there's plenty of them."

The construction of this pack-
age, though, could be better. The
interface is generally serviceable
but looks predictably CDTV-ish,
and if you want to abort that four
minute sound sample you just
started playing, tough. But all the
major components are IFF format,
so it's easy to reef them out for use
elsewhere. If you poke about on
the disc you can find the index
files for the cryptically named pic-
tures and sounds, which make it
easier to find what you're after.
World Vista's age also shows in
the country boundaries; as far as
this program's concerned, the
USSR still exists.

This is no gem, but it's far
from useless.

The Illustrated Works of
Shakespeare

It's easy to make a good
Shakespeare disc. Take the text,
which is in the public domain be-
cause old Will has been dead for
rather more than 50 years, stick it
on a disc in ASCII format, add a
DOS search program like Scan
hooked up to a simple AREXX or
C interface, and you've got it.

The idea of computerised refer-
ence books is efficiency and pow-
er, not atmosphere; if I want atmo-
sphere I'll get the leatherbound
Collected Works down off the
shelf.

This disc, in my opinion, could
have done more by doing less. The
interface is written in AMOS and
is hence predictably clunky, al-

Continued on page 64...

56

AMIGA Review

Confined from page 43...

dow. Transactions can be finalised
as cash, cheque, card, account, and
layby sales. Account and layby
payments are also provided for.
You can also do refunds, ex-
changes, extra charges, staff dis-
counts and petty cash vouchers. A
transaction can be put on hold
while another customer is being
served, then recalled later.

If you don't know the stock
code of an item, you can enter a
partial code or keyword and
Poswiz will list the closest match-
es; You can also use sub-
descriptions, so you can enter, say,
"plain black dress" and see a list of
all the sizes and variations in
stock.

Any transaction line can be
changed, and making corrections is
easy. You don't need to subtotal
before applying a staff or customer
discount. The sale total is visible at
all times.

You can enter customers as you
need while finalising a sale. All
transactions are stored in log files.
There is a new one each day, mak-
ing i( easy to archive old ones if

BELOW LEFT: The interface is
very slick.

BELOW RIGHT: A swag of pull
down menus!

space becomes tight. You can view
the transactions of any date by en-
tering the date and browsing the
file.

Marketing Tools

The key to marketing is infor-
mation, and Poswiz provides it in
reports and graphs. Reporting win-
dows allow you to search for any
range of the data available, then
select what information you want
pripted. You can create your own
reports as you need, or change the
sample reports provided.

Different report windows are
provided for departments, produc-
ts, groups, stock, suppliers, cus-
tomers, orders, invoices, laybys
and so on. Almost every type of
data can be printed as a report.

You can graph the performance
of any stock item week by week
over the last year. Not just the
number sold, but prices, markups
and other details. This graph is al-
so used to set the desired stock lev-
els for ordering.

There is also a special function
called Multi Graph. This lets you
show any particular value for all
records in a file. It works like a
cross section, showing, say, the
number sold of every item. The
idea is to let you spot unusually
high or low values and keep an eye
on them.

Multi Graph allows up to 10
different values on the same graph,
even from totally different sources.
You can compare all department

sales with all group sales, for ex-
ample.

Wrap Up

Poswiz's interface is non-
standard thanks to it's AMOS de-
sign, but it is very pleasant to use.
The online help connected to every
gadget is excellent. There are sev-
eral areas where you can customise
Poswiz, from changing the colours
to setting the format of a receipt.
Most settings can be changed to
suit your business. You can also
design your own receipts.

Poswiz works on all the Ami-
gas, including AGA models, with
at least 2Mb of RAM and a hard
drive. You'll need about 5Mb of
free space to store about 2000
stock items. You will also need a
printer for receipts. An electronic
cash drawer that is controlled and
opened via a signal from the joy-
stick port is available to complete
your system.

For more information contact
Unitech Electronics on (02) 820
3555. RRP is $399.

r ; ; K

'.':.. >-''

I:

'..*,. tot;

t s

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5 ft

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5AS*E«t&ssss

AMIGA Review

57

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list write David Doyle 129 Phillip St Waterloo
2017 N.S.W. Also wanted to buy Digita organiser
1.0 or similar, and reasonably price hard disk for
A500.

FOR SALE: 500 + W.B 2.1, 1Mb chip RAM. 52M
GVP HD/4Mb RAM fitted. A570 CD-ROM
drive/12 CDs, extra floppy drive. Phillips 8888-11
Col Monitor. All AGAR mags from first issue to
current. Lots of Software, All manuals & original
packing. Boxes of PD thrown in. $750 firm. Ph:
(069) 254 954

FOR SALE: A 1200 40Mb HD, 2Mb RAM, ROM
switcher 1.3/2.04, productivity sotware- WP,
Database, Spreadsheets, Graphics inc. Scala, disk
utilities, Vidi 12 RT, Typesmith, Video Director,
AB Tower Assault, Bump 'n' Burn, Theme Park,
Mortal Kombat II. $1200.00 ono or will swap for
CD32, also available CD32 software. Ph (07) 3379
5736

FOR SALE: A1200/40 6Mb RAM 1942 monitor, DO-
pus 5, Mavis Beacon, Games, CDs, disks, mags
and books preferably all sold together. Best rea-
sonable offer phone Adrian (02) 389 6996

FOR SALE: A2000, 1.3 & 2.0 ROMs (switchable),
1084 colour monitor, IBM Bridgeboard (with hard
disk and 5.25 floppy), sound digitiser, stacks of
original software (including S 1 800 worth of games
in boxes) and more. $550. GVP Series U

RAM/SCSI confollor card with 2Mb RAM and a
3.5", 120 Mb Quantum hard disk $450. Or $950 for
the LOT. Ph. (02) 797 0072 after 7 PM

FOR SALE: A2000, WB2, ring binder manual, GVP
combo - 40MHz EC030, 40MHz '882, 4Mb fast
RAM, SCSI controller. 327Mb Quantum Fast SCSI
2 HD (2Mb/sec transfer), 1084S Monitor, 2 FDD,
Star NX1000C Printer, 14.4K Simple Fax/Modem.
Software (all in boxes with manuals) - Deluxe
Video 3, Wordworth 3.1, Civilisation, Day of the
Pharaoh, Castles, Elite, Leather Goddesses of Pho-
bos, MegaTraveller 1 & 2, Silent Service, Hunt for
Red October, Feudal Lords, Journey, Bards Tale 2.
$2000 ono. Phone Jeff (08) 347 3236

FOR SALE: A3000, 105Mb HD, 6Mb RAM, Ext
FDD, NEC 3D Multisync Monitor $1900.00. Grey
Scale 400dpi Scanner $160.00, Vidi 12 digitiser
$120.00, collection of Amiga Format Mag (14-
present) $200.00, Huge amounts of software to
sell, EVERYTHING MUST GO!! Call me and
haggle. Ph (066) 452 722

FOR SALE: A4000/040, interlaced VGA monitor, ex-
ternal speakers, 6Mb memory, 850Mb hard drive,
Epson GT 6500 scanner, HP DeskJet* Inkjet print-
er, TBC+ (with 2Mb Fast RAM fitted), WB3.0,
software including: PPaint, Final Writer, AdPro,
Migraph OCR, Amigavision, TypeSmith, Amiback
+ Tools, Art Expression, Pagestream, Aminet 7,
Seek & Destroy, Dune II, The Settlers, Shanghai,
Tornado, M 1 Tank Platoon, all for a meagre sum of
$5800. Also Minolta EP2151 Photocopier with
auto doc feeder - $2000. Call Richard. Ph (049)
873 940

FOR SALE: A400O/ECO30 with 33MHz co-
processor, 6Mb RAM, 1942 multisync monitor,
AMAS audio sampler and MIDI interface, games
and music software $2500 ph (049) 2931 19

FOR SALE: A500 1.3 Wb. 2Mb ADRAM with manu-
als, ext. floppy drive. $300.00. AMIGA 500 1.3Wb
1Mb (NOT WORKING) $50.00. KURTA graphic
tablet nearly new, manuals and disks, $350. A590
populated to 2mb (needs attention) $150. Software:
Deluxe Video 3, Deluxe Photolab, Deluxe Music,
Digi-paint 3, Digimate 3, AMOS all in original
box, the lot $100.00. Ph (02) 331 4004 Eddie

FOR SALE: A500 system, but be quick !!! A500 run-
ning at 25MHz with 030 CPU and full MMU,
maths co pro (FPU), total 5Mb RAM (including 32
bit RAM) system selectable up to 133Mb RAM,
1084 monitor, fatter Agnus, Super Denise, both
soft and hard switchable between OS 2.05 and 1.3,
170Mb Connor SCSI HD, has cost me well over
$2800.00, but will sell for $1500.00 ono note the
hard drive is full of software from Aminet, cover
disks, and PD and shareware. Phone Garry (07)
5534 3883 (Gold Coast)

FOR SALE: A500, 1Mb Chip RAM, PSU, Mouse (not
C= make), coverdisks, Virus Checker and PD
games: $180 all up, A 1200 FastRAM expansion -
68882 socket and 1 SIMM socket (both bare): $85
(paid $200, GRRRR!!), $190 with 2MB SIMM.
5.25" 1.2Mb PC Floppy Drive; $50. Wordworth 2

58

AMIGA Review

FREE Reader Classifieds

AGA (all Amigas with 1.5Mb) $40. PC games -
Epic (1.44s) $20, Star Crusader (CD) $30. Amiga
& PC shareware & PD available: $1 per program,
$2.50 for "best of disks - call for catalogue. Phone
Jonathan on (08) 370 9107 after hours,

FOR SALE: A500, 1Mb chip, 4Mb fast, GVP 52Mb &
200Mb HDD, WB 2.1, software incl. Imagine 1, 2
& 3, ImageFX 1 & 2, DPaint 4, Scenery Animator
1 & 4.0 & lots of other paint and 3D programs,
Leisure Suit Larry 1 & 5, Dune, Flashback & many
more games & PD files, 1084S Monitor, MPS
1000 9 pin printer. $1500 o.n.o Call Dean on (02)
451 5090 s

FOR SALE: A500, 1Mb RAM, Phillips Monitor, GVP
Impact Series II, 9Mb RAM, SCSI Hard Drive, 50
■ disks. URGENT SALE $600.00 Ph (041 1) 190 325
Nigel

FOR SALE: A600 HD, 2Mb RAM, colour monitor,
B&W Printer, Heaps of software, disks, AF &
ACAR Magazines, $550.00 the lot. Ph 015 630025
(Stephen) or (07) 385 77765.

FOR SALE: AD & D Collectors Set $30. Dragon
Strike, Countdown to Doomsday, Pools of Dark-
ness, Secret of Silver Blades. All $25, FA- 18 Inter-
ceptor, 688 Attack Sub $20 (all boxed & instruc-
tions) Hard Nova, Starglider 2, Arcticfox $10ea
(originals with instructions & no box). Will swap
any 2 for Eye of Beholder 2 and Champs of Krynn.
Call Matt. Ph: (068) 422 135

FOR SALE: AMIGA 2000/3000/4000, GVP TBC+;
24 Bit Video Output, Keyer, 24 bit Frame Grabber,
Digital TBC, converts NTSC, PAL, SECAM to
NTSC, Pal, corrects colour, brightness, contrast,
sharpness, PERFECT CONDITION as new still in
box $990.00 Ph (066) 761 695

FOR SALE: Amiga 2000: 5Mb RAM (expandable to
9Mb); GVP Impact Series II HC+8 SCSI con-
troller; 2x52Mb HDs; Workbench 1.3/2
(switchable); mouse, keyboard and joystick; heaps
of original software including Dpaint, Kindwords,
Amigavision etc. all manuals included. $700 ono.
Ph (02) 755 3777

FOR SALE: COMPUTER GAMES. Starlord (NEW)
$45.00, Frontier Elite 2 $25.00, Settlers $25.00,
Robin Hood (Longbow plus hint book) $15.00,
Global Effect $10,00, Megatraveller $10.00, Storm
Master $7.00, Obitus $5.00, plus some Infocom
text adventures $5.00 each. All with manuals.
Phone Lyn. (055)976 543.

FOR SALE: EMPLANT DELUXE Macintosh Emula-
tor $550.00 Retina 24 bit board with 2Mb RAM
and version 2.x software $200.00 Ph (bh) 0411
129983

FOR SALE: Excelsior! BBS software v2.0 - Supports
RIP Graphics etc. $80.00 ring Michael on (02) 808
2675 or (02) 807 3563 BBS

FOR SALE: Laser Printer NEC Silent Writer $500.00
ono, CD-ROM external NEC still under warranty
wih cable, docs and software, $150.00 ono, 386
Bridgeboard to suit Amiga 2000 $500.00 or near
offer. Phone Steve (02) 708 4403

FOR SALE: Lots of games and utilities, too many to

list. Ph (074) 490 821

FOR SALE: Macintosh ROM sets to suit AMAX etc.
$70/set. Call Leslie. Ph (041 1) 247 170

FOR SALE: Original AMIGA 1000 Computer, as new
with manuals, $200,00 ono.

FOR SALE; Seiksliosa colour printer $75.00 ono.
Contact Harry on phone/fax (09) 307 3270.

FOR SALE: VIDEO TOASTER 4000 version 3.1
complete package as new. Ideal if going to US A or
other NTSC country. $1000.00. Contact Graham
Ph (02) 540 2882

KIDS LOGIC (new TAD disk): thinking games for
kids, features KidsTiles also new Plumber, Maze,
Cards 'o 'Rama, Puzz etc, AH profits to charity. To
order, send $6 + $2 postage to Amiga Disks, Tech-
nical Aid to Disabled, 67 Launceston St Lyons
ACT 2606.

OpalVision 24 bit graphics board as new $500. Rombo
Vidi -Amiga 24RT Professional digitiser new - still
under guarantee new price $499 sell for $399. DC-
TV digitising systems - Capture, paint and display
images in 24 bit, with RGB Converter (converts
DCTV composite to RGB for direct connection to
genlock, and allows other Amiga programs to be
used without switching cables etc) $450 Call Den-
nis. Ph (071) 525 022 or fax (071) 525 614

PRO PAGE: Manuals for sale $45 Ph (074) 490 821

WANTED TO BUY: 24 Bit Graphics card to suit
Amiga 2000. Phone Steve (02) 708 4403

WANTED TO BUY: A2000 power supply required
urgently, phone Greg (062) 924 546 at home.

WANTED TO BUY: C64 with 1541 disk drive, user
manuals, software, joystick and any other stuff that
goes with it. Please ring after 6PM (mon-fri) or
daytime on weekends. Ph (06) 255 2369

WANTED TO BUY: CD32, Games, cover disks, hard-
ware, anything, also tech info on SX- 1 and any oth-
er hardware for CD32. Ph Blade on (07) 282 8145
or (018) 874 704

WANTED TO BUY: Manual (photocopy OK) for
AMIGANET V1.4 (a LAN system for Amigas) or
contact Address for HYDRA-SYSTEMS, England.
Phone Barry Prior (049) 216588 (W) or (049)
486228 (H)

WANTED TO BUY: Modem, must be external, 2400
or 9600. Must be in good working order. Manuals
prefered but not necessary. Please phone/fax Jay on
(064) 938 432

WANTED TO BUY: SCHEMATICS for AMIGA
1200HD series E. Will pay sensible fee. Write to
OEAC, Post Office Clackline WA 6564 Ph. (09)
574 1269.

WANTED: Copy of Blitz Basic 2. Call Paul. Ph: (065)
513 551

WANTED: World class rugby, ET's Rugby Lea**:
Rainbow Island games esp. HD mstallafcfe ;
Call Matt with titles. Ph: (06* -'-'-

Send your FREE Reader i
Camperdown NSW 2959 i

■mtsGWMm

AMIGA Review

59

Reader Services - Back Issues

Jane 1993 Vol 10 No 6

- 3D Animation with Aladdin - Easy for
beginners - The Animation Workshop -
How to beat those disk swapping blues -
Deluxe Paint Tutorial - Animating in (ap-
parent) 3D.

- Amos column - Andy's Attic - Explor-
ing WB2 - CanDo - Your own directory
utility Part 2 - Education Column - World
construction set - Down the Opal mine -
Using the Alpha Channel - C64 Column -
Hot PD - Games - KGB, Fate - Gates of
Dawn, Darkseed, Civilisation, King's
Quest Full Solution Part 1.

July 1993 Vol 10 No 7

- Real 3D 2.0 - Accelerators - Golden
Gate - Microdeal Clarity - Home Ac-
counts 2 - DPaint - Animation in 3D.

A Education - Back to Basics - Amos -
CanDo - C64. Andy's Attic - Hot PD -
Gaines - Chaos Engine, Beavers, Sleep-
walker - Vikings, Solution to SuperFrog
Part 1, Kings Quest 2.

August 1993 Vol 10 No 8

- Show Report - Vidi Amiga 12 - Final
Copy II - Sound Digitising - Intro to
Desktop Video - Hypercache Professional

- Education - Aust Graphics Atlas - Can-
Do - DPaint Tutorial - C64 Column -
Amos Column - Opal Paint's Zap func-
tion

A Hot PD - Games - Hired Guns, Trolls,
Graham Gooch World Class Cricket- So-
lution to SuperFrog Part 2.

September 1993 Vol 10 No 9

- Art Expression - Paint Program -
68060: the Next Generation - Power
Copy Professional - Quarterback Tools
Deluxe - CanDo 2.5 Upgrade - DPaint
Tutorial - Hot PD.

•fa C64 Column - Amos Column - CanDo

- Education - Back to Basics Fractions -
Andy's Attic - How to create a RAD
drive - Games - Creatures, Flashback, Su-
per Frog, Body Blows, Dark Seed - Solu-
tion.

October 1993 Vol 10 No 9

- DPaint AGA - PC Task MSDOS emula-
tion - AmiBack Tools vs Quarterback
Tools Deluxe - Personal Paint - Hot PD -
Blitz - Andy's Attic - Workbench Tools -
DPaint Tutorial.

ik Education - Learn to play the Piano -
CanDo - Make your own Calendar - C64

- Graphics Software - Games - Campo's
Int Rugby - Reach for the Skies - Project
X Revised Edition, Syndicate, Street
Fighter II, Dune II.

November 1993 Vol 10 No 11

- Brilliance - Hoopy Paint - Amiga on the
Cheap - A1200 Video Tutorial - CED 3.5

- Frame Machine

ik Education - Personal Tutor - Blitz -
DPaint - HotPD - Latest Fish Disks -
CanDo - Amos - C64 - Gaines - Pinball

Fantasies, Desert Strike, Indiana Jones
and the Fate of Atlantis, KGB - Solution
Parti.

December 1993 Vol 10 No 12

- Amiga CD32 - an in depth look - Af-
fordable Tape Backup - SCRAM plus
Tamberg - Bernoulli Multi Drive vs
SyQuest 105

& EGS Spectrum - Education - HotFD -
Blitz - more clever functions - C64 - Can-
Do - Foreign Language file converter
■fr Games - Air Warrior, Two Player
Games, 101 PD Games, KGB - Solution
Part 2, CD32 Games Pinball Fantasies,
Oscar, Diggers.

January 1994 Vol 11 No 1

- Palmtop Computing - low price alterna-
tives to Amiga portable - Final Writer -
What the manual doesn't tell you -
Deluxe Music 2 - Quicknet - peer to peer
network - Understanding Libraries - Can-
Do - Getting key input - Hot PD - Amos -
New extensions for Amos Pro - Blitz -
Zones of control - Andy's Attic - C64
Bumper Tips - Games - ACAR PD
Games 2, Mean Arenas, Yo Joe!, CD32
Quickshots (D- Generation, Whale's Voy-
age, Overkill)

February 1994 Vol 11 No 2

- Understanding Genlocks - Final Writer

- CoolCat - clipart and animations - Ad-
vanced Amiga Analyzer - Upgrading
from a 68000 to an A1200 - Dpaint Tuto-
rial - Education - Mathmaster II - HotPD

- CanDo - Electronic Log Book

it Amos - Hacking AMOS Graphic
Modes - Blitz - Main loop for a GUI util-
ity - C64 - Art Gallery - Games - Ishar 2 -
Messengers of Doom, Frontier - Elite n,
Donk, Soccer Kid, Bob's Bad Day, Flash-
back - Solution Part I.

March 1994 Vol II No 3

- Image processing with Image F/X -
A 1230 Turbo Plus board - VIDI Amiga
12/24 - Capturing high quality images -
GVP's new time base corrector board -
Scala MM 300 Synchronous Multimedia

- Education - Search for Sanchez - Help
Line

is- DTP Column - Postscript - Hot PD -
Fish on ROM - CanDo - Make your own
Typing Tutor - Blitz Basic - Data Secu-
rity - C64 - Online Amiga - Games -
Body Blows, Galactic, Zool 2, Alien 3,
Lotus Trilogy, Flash Back solution part 2,
Deep Force, The Patrician.

April 1994 Vol 11 No 4

- Montage 24 - 24 bit video titling - War-
ranties and your rights - Where do you
stand - How to get Broadcast - Sell your
Amiga graphics - Introduction to Internet

- World's largest network.

it Scenery Animator 4 - Virtual virtual
reality - Upgrading Fat Agnus - Educa-

tion - Fun at Sideshow Alley - Blitz Basic
Strings - CanDo - Working with Amiga
DOS - DPaint Tutorial.
it Hot PD - New Fish, plus Mand2000 -
Helpline - Amos - Interfaces without
banks - Online - Games you can play on
your local BBS - C64 - Useful pokes -
Games - Assasin (Amiga Games Pack),
Cannon Fodder, Tornado, Stardust, Dis-
posable Hero, CD32 Games - Micro-
cosm, Fly Harder.

May 1994 Vol 11 No 5

- Understanding Amiga Graphics - Com-
puter images often require a compromise
between quality and file size - we explain
how to acheive the best balance -
Modems - An introduction for Beginners

- A modem can bring all kinds of infor-
mation to your Amiga at a very rea-
sonable cost - Up and Running - Making
your modem work - trouble shooting and
a checklist of what to do,

■ft Persona! Write - super cheap word
processing with interesting features -
Map Studio Vol 1 - JPEG graphics -
DPaint Tute - The DPaint beginners
Mend - Deluxe Paint Tutorial - The sky's
not the limit - Education - Crossword
Wizard - Hot PD - Utilities extract more
from Workbench - Blitz Basic - Squeez-
ing your Data - Desktop Publishing -
Creating Reversed text - Help Line -
Problems solved - Online AMIGA! -
Start your own MAX'S BBS - C64 Col-
umn - CMD picks up GEOS - Games -
The Settlers, Second Samurai, Kingmak-
er - Quest for the Crown, CD32 Games -
Trolls, Alien Breed/Quak, Project X.

June 1994 Vol 11 No 6

- Art Department Professional 2.5 - The
latest version - The future with AAA,
new AAA chips! - DirWork 2 - Amiga
Picture Viewers, which is the best - we
compare 20 of them - Neptune Genlock,
Desktop Video just got better - Amiga
Animation Software.

& DTP Column, Creating forms in Pro
Page - Hot PD - Online Amiga - Blitz
Basic - C64 - Games - Liberation - Cap-
tive II, Skidmarks, Cliffhanger, Apoc-
alypse, Legacy of Sorasil - CD32 Games,
Surf Ninjas, Global Effect,

July 1994 Vol 11 No 7

- Wordworth 3,0 First Impressions - Disk
Expander Review - Imagine 3.0 Review -
TypeSmith 2.02 - MiGraph MS 1200 -
Networking Intro - PARNET -
PageStream 3.0 - Video Creator CD32

-& Columns - Hot PD - Amos - CanDo -
Arexx - Education - Real 3D - Online -
Blitz - DTP Column - C64 - Entertain-
ment, James Pond 3, Noddy's Big Ad-
venture, Dyna Blaster, Mr Nutz - Hop-
pin' Mad, Star Trek 25th Anniversary

Reader Services - Back Issues (continued)

August 1994 Vol 11 No 8

- Word worth 3.0 vs Final Writer, Is big-
ger always better? - Virtual Memory,
Good as RAM? Using your hard disk to
make up follow memory - TypeSmith
Font Design, Convert, edit and create
typefaces for your Amiga - Biomechan-
ics, Podiatrists find a use for the Amiga
with a video digitiser - Deluxe Paint Tu-
torial, Creating lifelike textures and ani-
mation - Microvitec Monitor, The ideal
monitor surfaces at last, perfect for AGA
machines - Imagine 3 Tutorial - Anima-
tion Column - InfraREXX Control - Soft-
ware for Little Kids, a suite of programs
for little kids.

ft Columns - HotPD - DTP - Humorous -
Online - CanDo - C64 - PowerDOS -
AMOS - CD32.

-ft Edutainment - KidPix, painting made
fun - Games, K240, Dragon Tiles.

September 1994 Vol 11 No 9

- Stepping up to CD-ROM, review of the
NEC 3X triple speed drive - Piracy, Alive
and Well - PAL. Lightwave, Newtek's
monster 3D rendering package is now
available sans Toaster - SX-1 CD32 Ex-
pansion - Supra 28 Turbo, Supra 28Mhz
68000 accelerator gives you power with-
out the price - DevCon Report.

ft Columns - Hot PD - DTP - Online -
CanDo - PowerDOS - Amos - CD32 - C
Programming - Education.
ft Games - Armour Geddon II - Fury of
the Furries - Brian the Lion - Benefactor -
Traps and Treasures.

October 1994 Vol 11 No 19

- A TBC on your desktop? Improve the
quality of your next DTV effort - Amiga
into the future, what Commodore UK has
in store - Fast Animation, no hardware -
A2000 revisited - Graphics boards and
mode promotion - Personal Animation

| Recorder - Registering your Shareware -
Turn your A 1200 into a CD32... almost!
IJr Columns - HotPD - Blitz Basic - On-
line - Power DOS - C Programming -
Games - Nick Faldo's Golf, Pirates, Im-
possible Mission 2025 "The special edi-
tion".

NovemberlDecember 1994
Vol 11 No 11

- Brilliance 2.0, 24 bit painting without
extra hardware - power to the people! -
Disaster Recovery, when in trouble or in
doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Or read this. - Quark Express vs
PageStream 3.0, How does the new kid
on the Amiga DTP block stack up - Mon-
ey Matters, a cash book for small busi-
ness and home - G-Lock, GVP's software
controlled genlock - Understanding Fonts

- CD Roundup - Easy Ledgers, profes-
sional accounting.

-■: Columns - Blitz Basic - Online -
AMOS - C64 C Programming - Games -

JetStrike - Secrets of Frontier Elite Hint-
book, Review of the Competition Pro Su-
per CD32 Controller,

SPECIAL EDITION ANNUAL
January 95 Vol 12 No 1

- Lightwave Goodies, extra software fi-
nally in Australia - CEI Conference, hot
from the Internet CEI boss Alex Amor
speaks - Retnoveable storage shootout,
comparision of Bernoulli and Fujitsu
230Mb drives - Magic Lantern - Surf the
Net, Internet access with your Amiga.

ft ANNUAL SPECIAL - Amiga Dealer
List - Amiga Service Centre List - Amiga
BBS Listing - Fish Listing
ft Columns - Online, DPaint, C64 -
Games - Super StarDust Alien Breed
Tower Assault, Cannon Fodder 2, Beau
Jolly Pack including Cannon Fodder, The
Chaos Engine, The Settlers, and T2: The
Arcade Game. CD32 Banshee.

February 1995 Vol 12 No 2

- Amiga digital video, full digital video
editing. - Workbench 3.1 .latest version
reviewed - PC-Task , Winclows capable
Amiga for $129 - Deluxe Paint 5, a sneak
preview - Personal Paint 6.0, and the
Cloanto competitor! - CEI Conference II,
Alex Amor speaks again!

ft Dealer List update - Corrections and

extensions to the January listing.

ft Service Centre List - More corrections

and extensions.

ft Columns - Online - C64 - Hot PD -

Demo Scene - AMOS - Blitz Basic -

Power Amiga DOS

Games - Rocketz - Mr Blobby - The

Clue! - Top Gear 2 - Marvins Marvellous

Adventure - Rise of the Robots -

March 1995 Vol 12 No 3

- Datastore, a new wave in databases -
Real 3D versus Lightwave, both com-
pared - Internet, Cool places on the Web -
Aura Interactor - A570, Fitting a SCSI
hard disk to the A570 CD-ROM - Word-
worth 3.1 - CanDo 3.0, New Version -
XCAD 3000, Professional CAD on the
Amiga - Commodore Deathbed Vigil and
A 1200 Intro 2 reviewed. - Insight Di-
nosaurs, Insight Technology.

-ft User Group Listing
ft Columns - Help Line - Hot PD - On-
line - AMOS - Blitz Basic - C64 - Demo
Scene

ft Games - Theme Park - Soccer kid -
Subwar 2050 - X-it

April 1995 Vol 12 No 4

-Getting onto the internet - Using bones
in imagine, powerful animation tools -
Photogenic s, the creative alternative to
AD Pro - Studio II, the real man's printer
driver - IOQ, Is accounting package up to
scratch - CAM CD, how good is CAM-
CD - Pyramid Mouse Master
ft Professional Amiga audio, sunrize plus

Bars and Pipes - AmigaDOS tuition - Fi-
nal Writer Update - Black Computers
Faster.

ft- Columns - Help Line - Education -
C64 - Blitz Basic - Online - Hot PD -
Demo Scene

ft Gaines - Base lumbers - Sensible Wor-
ld of Soccer - Fifa International Soccer

May 1995 Vol 12 No 5

- Boot CD32/CDTV disc on your Amiga,
what's new in CD-ROMs - Squirrel SCSI
Interface for your A120O - Directory Op-
us 5 - PC Task 3.1 - Essence and Forge,
roll your own multimedia - Get organised
with Digita Organiser - ZedREXX Sim-
ple GUI creation - The final word - A dif-
ferent view of Databases.

ft 1995 Reader Survey
ft Columns - Hot PD - Help Line - Edito-
rial - Online - Art Gallery - Media Watch
ft Games - Pinball illusions ■ All terrain
racing - Jungle Strike - Enemy Unknown.

June 1995 Vol 12 No 6

- ADPro, ImageFX and Imagemaster,
how do they stack up? - Whats new in
modems - The Amiga reborn, Escoms
buyout and their plans - SLIP Internet ac-
cess - Do it yourself home control - First
look at home control - Meeting Pearls 2 -
Australian Geographic Encyclopedia.

ft Columns - Help Line - C64 - Blitz -

Online - HotPD - Demo Scene

ft Games - Aladdin - Kingpin Bowling =

The Lion King

ft AMIGA Specialists List

July 1995 Vol 12 No 7

- The NEW Amiga, ESCOM's plans to
take shape - Budget A 1200 Accelerators -
Iomega Zip Drive, the drive that'll kill
the SyQuest - AM AX IV - OS 3.1 and
graphics boards - Aminet 6, the best gets
better - Turbocalc 2.0 - The Internet
Movie Database - How to use gradients -
Photogenics 1.2 - Nureality Vivid 3D
Plus

ft Columns - Help Line, Online, Hot PD.

AMOS

ft Games - Dawn Patrol

ft AMIGA Specialists list

August 1995 Vol 12 No 8

- Cyberstorm 6S060, the fastest Amiga
ever! - Shapeshifter MAC emulation -
ASIMCDFS v3 - Directory Opus 5.11
upgrade - Wordworth tutorial - Storage
Wars - Trivia] Pursuit

ft Columns - Help Line - Hot PD - C64 -
Working Workbench - Online - AMOS
Art Gallery - Media Watch
ft AMIGA Specialists list

$3 SO each inc. pp. Send cheque or
money order, or phone/fax Tsredit num-
ber to: Storm Front Studios, PO Box
278, Camperdown NSW 2050. Phone:
(02) 5574266 Fax; (02) 565 1220.

-ROM

... continued from page 56

though to its credit it does let you
search for words or phrases in one
or several works. And the pictures,
mono scans of period engravings,
don't annoy you much. And in a
small font on a decent screen you
can actually see quite a lot of
whatever you're looking at at once.
And I can even forgive the title of
The Tragedy Of Julius Caesar be-
ing spelled "Caeser". The text is
actually in ASCII format on the
disk (PC ASCII carriage re-
turn/line feed line ends, but I'll let
that pass), although unfortunately
carved up into teeny tiny scene-
sized bits - the interface doesn't let
you scroll smoothly through a play
or sonnet, you have to hop to the
next scene, and then, maybe only
three lines later, hop again.

Inelegant, but maybe worth $9.
Maybe.

Pandora's CD

Ah, yes. The dog. Every CD
collection has a dog in there some-
where, and here it is. This is a
CDTV demo/promotional disc,
which plugs the CDTV with a load
of dated animation and dodgy pic-
tures, and also tries to sell products
made by a company called Opton-
ica that you can't buy any more. A
coaster.

Team Yankee

This is not actually a CD game.
It is a floppy game, put onto CD.
99% of this disc is empty.

That said, Team Yankee's still
not bad, although it's been around
a few years now. You control
tanks, 3-D vector environment, kill
the Rus skies, rah rah rah. It's not
really a realistic simulator experi-
ence, but for $9 it's OK.

Aimathera Photo
Library CD

This is more like it. 530Mb of
256 colour, HAMS and 24 bit pic-
tures, in various categories, and

with quality levels usually ranging
from good to excellent. There are
some frankly lousy pics in there, a
few are corrupt and some are du-
plicated - but there are enough oth-
ers for the disc still to be perfectly

usable. There's a slab of piccies
which show off Photogenics' range
of effects and a usable demo of
Photogenics (which, coincidental-
ly, Aimathera also make), but
there's plenty of plain old pictures
in plenty of categories nonetheless.
If you're after a pile of sample pic-
tures to play with in your image
editing package, or whatever, this
is a great source.

There are 86 Photo CD format
images on the disc, which are NOT
in a directory with the right name
and do NOT have the right support
fdes and so can NOT be viewed by
anything other than a Photo CD
loader for an image processing
package, or similar. I wouldn't be
so annoyed about this, if it weren't
for the fact that the latest version
of the excellent AsimCDFS makes
Photo CD handling a complete
doddle, translating them on the fly
so they look like 24 bit IFFs to any
viewing program - but only if the
disc they're on is pretty close to
the proper Photo CD format. And
some genius compiling the disc set
them all up to view with ViewTek,
which does NOT support Photo
CD files. Yay team.

Aimathera Clipart and
Fonts CD

This disc's about a third full, ■
but you still get a pile of stuff.

There are more than 6500 black
and white clip art images - again,
some are crud and some are repeat-
ed, but so it goes with PD clip art
collections.

You also get better than a thou-
sand fonts, about three quarters
bitmapped, and the rest mainly
Postscript, with 88 CompuGraphic
thrown in. After testing every sin-
gle one of them, I can report that I
am lying and looked at a few. The
ones I looked at were OK.

Overall

Before you even think of get-
ting this package, if you've got a
regular Amiga with a CD-ROM
drive and not a CDTV or CD32,
get yourself CD-Boot. This pack-
age will allow you to start "all the
disks in the pack that really want
to be running on a CDTV, and
hence contain hardcoded refer-
ences to the CD-ROM drive being
called CDO and plenty of other
special features to stop them work-
ing without Great Mucking About
on a regular Amiga. I got them
working, but I didn't enjoy it at all.
Get CD-Boot. You know it makes
sense. Ad concludes.

This collection is not a careful-
ly planned, cohesive whole. It's
three new disks and seven oldies,
repackaged and tweaked a bit. For
your S89 you get the excellent Net-
working disc, the quite good Photo
Library, the OK Clipart and Fonts,
the average Team Yankee, World
Vista and Shakespeare, the ancient
CDPDs and Demo disc and the
useless Pandora's. I can't recom-
mend this pack to everyone, but
given that you're paying the price
of about two and a half Aminet
discs, it's worth thinking about.
Check it out.

Contact Don Quixote (076) 391
578. $89.

64

AMIGA Review

I Here's a blast from the past.
Remember Speedball II? Back in
1991, it was THE Amiga sports
game; forget your soccer, or golf,
or darts; computer game sports
meant big nasty cybernetically
enhanced blokes in armour
charging frantically around an
ironclad field, pounding each other
witless and trying to slam a steel
ball into the other side's goal,

Pinball-style bonus gadgets,
lots of things to pick up including
cash to beef up your guys, a bit of
strategy (pass to the big bloke and
take cover), superfast gameplay
and the chance to go up against
your friends; no wonder it sold
like hot cakes. Speedball IFs
joined the Amiga gaming hall of
fame, along with other deathless
classics like Marble Madness,
Arkanoid and F/A 18 Interceptor.
Hey, any game that gives you a
goal for getting an enemy player
stretchered off is all right with me.

Well, all thesfmany years later
(well, four of 'em anyway),
Speedball TT has finally made it to
the CD32. And the Bitmap
Brothers, sensibly in my view,
have hardly changed it at all. The
graphics are a bit smoother -
though still not full PAL size - and
the sound's enhanced too, but the

game plays exactly the same. A
case could be made for
abandoning the old one-button
control system and, say, making
one button throw the ball low and
one throw high - but getting that
low-throw tap right is a skill that
kids today should learn. If you
want to get good, though, I hope
you can use a gamepad VERY
accurately; get yourself a good one
button joystick or two, otherwise -
you'll humiliate your friends much
more effectively with a stick, and
that's what it's all about, after all.

This game was, and is,
excellent. If you've already got it
for your old ECS Amiga, then
don't bother with this version; in a
dim light you couldn't tell the
difference, thanks to the
superlative quabty of the original
version's visuals. But if you've
missed the Speedball II experience
and think your reflexes are up to it,
it comes highly recommended. For
$49, you really can't do better. Do
yourself a favour, and all that.

Speedball 2

Available from Amiga
software dealers. $49 for
CD32 and AGA disk
versions. Contact
Amadeus Computers on
(02) 651 1711 for more info.

AMIGA Review

65

USER GROUP GRAPEVINE

N.S.W

East Coast Amiga Inc

PO Box 344
Gosford 2250

Wyong First and Third
Thursday each
month at 8pm
Ph: 043 922 567. Bill

Gladstone Amiga
Users Group

PO Box 1 6
Gladstone 4680

President: Dick Bridge

Amiga Creative

Bundaberg Commodore &

Ph: 043 232 1 79

Enthusiasts

Amiga Computer Users

Newsletter -Output

1 6 Cowper St

Group

J

Port Kembla 2505

14 Miles St

A.M.I.G.A (A Macarthur

Ph: 042 752 493

Bundaberg 4670

—

Interest Group for the Amiga)

Secretary: Brian Gale

Secretary: Mr.RAttwood

President Norbert Peter

Ph:071 529 215

Feist

Northern Rivers Amiga

Meetings- First Sunday of

Users Group

each month

Commodore User Group

55 Bridge St

Time- 12:30pm -4:30pm

PO Box 409

Lismore 2480

Curtin 2605

Meetings- Uniting Church

Ph:06 281 2714

Hal! every second Tuesday
of the month

TASMANIA

Muswellbrook Combined

Time- 7:00pm

Tasmanian Commodore

Computer Group

Users Association

President: Jan Hickey

PO Box 673

Ph: 065 433 740

VICTORIA

Hobart 7000

PO Box 648

President: Craig Spencer

Muswellbrook 2333

Compupal Amiga users

Ph: 002 493 236

Meetings -Red Cross Hall

Support Group

Newsletter- Discourse

Second Saturday each

PO Box 7014

month

Karingal Centre 3199

Time- 7:30pm

Ph: 039 789 1906
Newsletter- Disk-Link

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Singleton Computer

Amiga Users Group of W.A

-4

Users Group

Emerald Mines Club

PO Box 595

E

60 Gardener Court

PO Box 32

Cloverdaie 6105

Singleton Heights 2330

North Geelong 321 5

President- Bill Sharpe- Smith

1

President: Michael Maher

Ph: 09 362 3539

:

Ph: 065 731 044

Meetings- Second Tuesday

QUEENSLAND

every month

Southern Sydney

Newsletter- Augment

Commodore User Group

Commodore-Amiga

PO Box 217

Computer Users Group

Beverley Hills 2209

PO Box 274

SOUTH AUSTRALIA

President: Steve Perry

Springwood 4127

Ph: 528 6117

President: Keith Antoine

S.A Commodore Computer

Ph: 07 300 2161

Users Group

Tuggerah Lakes

Newsletter- Cursor

PO Box 427

Commodore Users Group

North Adelaide 5006

PO Box 659

Dedicated Operators of

Toukley 2263

Amiga Users Group

Meetings- Wyong High

PO Box 159

School Library.Alison Rd

Mermaid Beach 4218

62

AMIGA Review

r T . ; i i i.

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Huge ranges of^am&s software for IBM, Amiga, Mac,
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I It had to happen. You don't
come up with a cult- folio wing
game like Skidmarks and just
leave it at that. If they can make
three Die Hards, there's certainly
room for more than one Skid-
marks.

If you missed it last time, Skid-
marks is a minimally realistic but
maximally entertaining iso metric -
projection screen-scrolling over-
head view race game, in which lit-
tle cars of various designs skid,
slam and bounce their way around
a selection of tracks. It's all been
done before, of course, but never
as niftily, and New Zealand-based
Acid Software have done rather
well for themselves out of Skid-
marks.

Super Skidmarks adds a num-
ber of new features. For a start,
there are plenty more car designs,
including such classics as the po-
lice van and the cow (yes, you
read that right). You also get de-
tailed instructions on rendering
your own cars in Imagine. The
cars are just cosmetic, though;
they all handle the same.

But you can change car perfor-
mance, quite startlingly. If the
"classic" cars are too speedy for
your liking, you can downgrade
everyone to pedal cars, which
can't manage a skid on any corner
and actually let even lousy drivers

win, because the computer drivers
don't know how to handle gutless
vehicles. But speed freaks out
there will be much happier with
the several grades of faster cars,
whose engine notes suggest 20,000
RPM redlines and whose perfor-
mance from jumps must be seen to
be believed. Very tricky to control,
but that's half the fun.

There are 12 new tracks, and
you can use the original 12 as
well.

Owners of AGA machines can
now have up to eight cars racing at
once, and even play in high res
mode and see four times as much
play area. Up to four people can
race together on a shared screen,
via two sticks and keyboard con-
trols or the more elegant four play-
er joystick adaptor (not included -
but instructions to make one are).
The computer drivers are smarter,
too - but still not e\actly geniuses.

There's also now a triple split
screen mode, so three people can
play one one machine without be-
ing annoyed by averaged screen
locations.

Or you can use the improved
communications support; race over
the phone line or null modem ca-
ble!

One option that I'm surprised
wasn't included before is caravan
towing. This halves the number of

AMIGA Review

possible simultaneous vehicles,
and attaches a reversed Tepeat of
your vehicle to the towbar you
never knew you had until now, and
the "caravan" flaps and jackknifes
as you'd expect it to. Now all they
need is a Portaloo-towing race and
the game will be complete.

Until that day, Super Skid-
marks is where it's at in fun to
play, thoroughly unrealistic race
games. Brilliant fun.

□

Super Skidmarks

Available from Amiga
software dealers. $69 for
CD32, $49 for ECS disk
version.

Contact Amadeus
Computers on (02) 651
1711 for more information.

AMIGA Review

67

i

r

istanct

- traveltect: 1 yds. j

ftJtrf TJJ

i

, Hole *1 Far H
;5] Stroke 6 E
[Distance; 13 yds.

E^S £1 KUitfUtfUUH

V *

ICJWPEAN TS^^
TOUR"

1 1 can't help getting the impres-
sion that the standard project for
the end of the Game Programming
101 course is the writing of a golf
game. There's so many of the
blighters. The PC world's riddled
with 'em.

We on the Amiga have been
spared much of the glut; EA
Sports' PGA European Tour is the
only golf game I've played on the
CD32. And as these games go, it's
not bad at all.

The basic idea is the same as
always. Your player's viewed
from behind, you can aim shots on
a map of the course or by moving
a crosshair back and forth in the
normal view, you can pick clubs
and even change your stance. Tak-
ing the shot is via the time-
honoured moving bar method;
click to start the bar moving, dick
to set power, click to achieve (or
avoid) hook and slice. If you do a
shot of decent length the view cuts
away to let you see the ball ap-
proaching its target as well as
speeding away from you. If you
get this game for your CD32,
make sure you've also got a
mouse; you can't control it without
one.

There are lots of options. You
can play practice, tournament,
skins, Canon shoot-outs or regular
matches against other humans or

60 simulated PGA lour pros. There
are prodigious and generally em-
barrassing statistics about your
performance. There's bail lie, hints
from the pros, contoured greens
and five PGA tour courses, faith-
fully reproduced.

If you're after a golf game for
the CD32, this is the one to get.
Sure, it's formula stuff, but it's
competently executed, well docu-
mented and plays well. The graph-
ics and animation aren't amazing
but they're not ugly either and
there aren't any faux pas like near-
by trees turning to Lego. The
sound's very sparse, but I can't say
that bothers me" much.

There's not much on the CD -
the CD32 version's the same as
the AG A disk one - and I haven't
checked out the ECS disk version.
But who needs monster CD anima-
tions or other trimmings? Good
gameplay makes up for it. If you
like this sort of thing, this is the
sort of thing you'll like.

PGA European Tour

Available from Amiga software
dealers; $69 each for AGA,
CD32 and ECS versions.
Contact Amadeus Computers
on (02) 651 1711 for more
information.

AMIGA Review

► There are a number of com-
ponents to OK games that just get
mixed up and repackaged over and
over again. There's nothing wrong
with the result - done well, it can
be excellent - but if you're after
something refreshingly original
you'll be disappointed.

Virocop is a game from this
mix-and-match genre, but having
said that I must admit it's rather
good.

There is, of course, an irrele-
vant storyline, but what it boils
down to is that you're a cute little
golden robot thingy with a wide
variety of cute but nasty weapons
and you cruise around various
semi-3D levels blasting things.

The bad guys are mainly cute,
except for the green and squishy
viruses, which are what you have
to kill before you can go to the
next level. Killing the other bad
guys is optional, but if you do you
get extra energy-stuff, which you
can use to buy new weapons via a
slightly overcomplicated but us-
able enough inter-level circuit
board screen.

There are 20 special weapons
plus an invulnerability gadget, and
they all have an energy cost appro-
priate to their beefiness. , Many
have limited ammo, some don't.

You can kit yourself out with any
three available weapons for each
level, and you can also pick up ex-
tras during the level.

There are two slightly-original
features to Virocop. The levels are
laid out snakes-and-ladders style -
you climb upwards as you play via
ramps and jumps, but a slip can
send you off an edge and subse-
quent panic will often land you
back at the beginning. Fortunately
there's no time limit, so falling
back is just annoying, not fatal
(unless you've left a load of bad-
dies unkilled...).

The other unusual feature is the
robot control. As well as simple
point and shoot cruising, you can
use two joysticks and have one
person steering the body and an-
other aiming and firing the inde-
pendently targetable gun - or one
ambidextrous show-off doing
both.

This is not a Revolution In
Computer Gaming. It's not the
One Game You Must Buy This
Year. But it's well made, and chal-
lenging, and fun. The graphics are
clear and cheerful, the sound's
OK, it plays smoothly, it's hard
disk installable and you can even
involve a friend. Worth having.

□

AMIGA Review

Virocop

Available from Amiga
software dealers.
AGA and ECS Amiga
versions both S69,
Contact Amadeus
Computers on (02) 651
1711 for more information.

69

Australian Commodore &

For Professional and Home Users

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- Text Editors ■ Az, UEdit. QED. CME
*■ Text Editors Guide

* Wordproeessing -Text Plus,
AmigaFQX, Uner, SuperRetLab,
GWPRirct & Print Studio

- Pretext 4.3 - Includes spell
checker, word count, footnotes,
anagrams - hundreds more
features. Teirt only - no graphics.

- Bowling ■ Keep track of bowling
scores. 1Mb requited.

Communications

■ NCOMM 3.0 ■ Shareware AREXX,
SCRIPTlng, simple 8BS mode,
■Term 3_d - Freeware, scripling,
powerful, 3 dtsks, ha/d drive ngq.
WB2.x j-equired.

Fonts

■ CQ-Font Pack 1 ■ Suitable for
Workbench Z.r. and above. Final

Copy. Professional Page. Fagestr&am
and PageSettar J4JJ . 60 different

Compugraphic fonts. 6- disk set.

- 0Pt-Wapj^d Font Pack 1 - Suitable
for Worbench 1 .3. Over 40 different
fonts, ready to use directly from floppy

- ideai for Deluxe Paint and most paint
programs. 6 Disk Set.

Crip Art

■ Clip Art Pack 1 - A selection of black
and whiter bjimapped clips, suitable
for wordpiooBssing and desktop
publishing. Three disk set - £13.50

■ Structured Clip 1 - Assorted
ProDraw format clip -art.

Desktop Publishing

' Pagestream Enhancer - requires
Pagestream 2.x or better. New
drivers, Postscript utilities and more.
» Professional Page Enhancer -
requires PPage 3.x or better. Lots of
grsal genies for smart borders,
copying pages, group, special effects.

* PageSettar 1.2 - Enlry level desktop
publishing program.

Cartoons (Require 1Mb FREE)

■ Cartoon 1: Batman, ShunJecook,
Stealthy

- Cartoon 2: Amy Vs Walker

■ Cartoon 3; Jugette, Jugette 2,
Juggler £

' Cartoon *f: Ft e Combat, Stealthy
Manver ll

■ Cartoon s: Digs Bunny
Big Cartoons (Require 3Mb)

* 8ig Cartoon 1: Antl-Lemmlogs

■ Gig Cartoon 2: Coyote

* Big Cartoon 3: Pogo

* Big Cartoon 4: The Dating Game (2
disks)

■ Gig Cartoon 5: Unsporting

* Big Cartoon 6: Enterprise Docking

* Big Cartoon 7: Bert-Masking

Education

' Education 1 ■ Elements, Draw Map h

Rubik, Space Log, Gears

Minimorph

Create your own
animation of
morphing just like
program costing
$100's. We'll even
scan in your photos
for you and prepare
them ready for
processing. ($5 per
photo)

Works in grey-scale
only, 1Mb RAM
required. Powerful
reasonably easy to
learn interface. Ideal
for A1 200,

- Education 2 - Gravily Wei, P rtni-ls,
life Cycles. Orbit, Enigmas, ZPIot

■ Education 3 ■ Word Puzzle.
Crossword, Word Game, A-Soive,
POWER LOGO!

* Education 4 ■ PEotMap ■ Two disk set
-creates maps of world, save in IFF
format.

- Hypertext ■ Create text files wlfh
links to animation, graphics, sounds,
songs - anything (via AREXX). 1 Mb &
WB2.K required.

- Stockmarket Simulation - Buy and
sell shares, take out a bank overdraft
and avenlually qualify to jolng the
insiders club. Local program to
simulate local conditions.

■ Chemistry - Create 3D models of
different molecules

Emulation

* Atari Emulator - German Only
' MS-DOS Emulator - PC-TASK

(shareware-no write to disk) &
Transformer. Run most MS-DOS
business software.

* C64 Emulator - Run C64 Program,

Interface C64- Peripherals (opL
interface available from U.S.A. Only)

Graphics and Animation

- Graphics 1 - SHU Store: For
sequencing stills for video prgducflan

■ Graphics 2 ■ fviostra h FmageLab,
TltfeGan, sMovia, ABridge,
SceneGenDemo, SHdeMaster

* Graphics 3 - Icon-Editor. Turbo Title,
Cyro -Animation Utita

■ Graphics 4 ■ FreePaint, Graffiti,
PED, PfcBase - IFF Database

* MartdlaBrot Tools - Six Disks, Create
amazing shapes and patterns!

- MiniMrjrpFn - Create your own 1 6

grey-sc£te morptis. 1Mb

■ AGA Demos 1 - HOES-AGA and

AGA- Amiga Boing.

* Mobfief - By Spacebars - 3D

J^

DISK PRICES

All our disks are covered by one
pricing schedule. All prices includes
postage, packing and support
Disks Price

Cost/Disk

$5.00

$9.50

$13.50

$17.00

$20.50

$24.00
(for otdeisaf 6arnmredisksjeach
additional disk is $3.75) We use quality
Memorex Brand diskettes.

$5.00
$ 4.75
$4.50
$4.25
$4.10
$ 4.00

Price includes postage.
C.O.D extra $4.75

Animation, A1200 and 3000

compatible.

' AGA Images - Six disks of hot AGA

picctes including 3D rendered in

Aladdin, and photos.

• Imagine Objects 1 - Enterprise,
Chess Pieces, Amiga 3003.

Mu&ic and Sound

■ Med 3.1 - The bast Amiga Eow-level

sequencer ■ some MIDI support
' Sound Tools - Play, edil, arrange,
distort and create IFF sound samples

* Sound FX 1 ■ FlUed with short, sweet
sound samples ■ Belts, Horns, Dogs..

- Remix 1 - Two remixed music
samples - Madonna and Black Box

•Tracks 1 - 1733, Agression, Angles,
Arkenoid, Atmospheric, AxelF r

A/wii^v

- Tracks 2 - Beat, Benny, Btoeftall ,
Siochal2, Blue Days, Blue Moon,
Boss, Call Me, T,C.S.

- Tracks 5 - Cloud Song, Crealion £,
Crockets, Ear, Hectric Dreams, Lasl
Ninja II, Megaforce, Metal Synth

* Tracks 4 - Oxygene, Piano-Plrnk,
PopCorn, RSI-Hard, Skylkjhj, Smoke,
SupeBASIC, Tocatta

* Tracks 5 ■ BatOance, Bond, Fresh
House, Lambada, Pawnt, Wasteland

■ Movie Samples - 9 Disks of IFF
"Make My Day" style samples

{Tracks 6-23 also available now.)

Improve Your Workbencfi

■ AGA Utilities 1 - AGA Anim players,
picture showers, AEA disable, OIF
shower and more.

• WB1 .3 Superdlsk - Bootabte,

ready-to-run. Read/Wrirte MS-DOS
disks, DIRWORK Ills manager.

AutoCLl WB Enhancer, includes
Documentation on disk.

• WB2.X Enhancer - Icons, Presets,
NAG program for appointments,
Fractal Screen Blanker, KCommodity;

Play Deluxe
Galaga

* A brilliant remake of
the arcade classic - lots
: • levels, truck loads of

variation, buy more
powerful weapons, earn
extra ships and find the
ten game secrets.

Auto window activation,
CloctoMemory usage. Keystroke
Audible Click, Gadgailess window
dosing, Holkey, Mouse
accelerator and much more-.
» Antivirus ■ Latest protection
using BOOTX, Tutorial on Virus
Proteclton and more ^

• Hacker ■ Flip music from games.
create custom boo* blocks, look
for secret messages on disks

■ DOS Utilities EM ■ A1 the Ealsst PD
Utilities to organise you disks

■ MS-DOS Utilities - READ.WFIITE
and FORMAT 720K MS-DOS
Disks!

- Hard Disk Unties 1 - UD
Backup, Alock security, Undelder,
Disk editor, mark out bad blocks,
aller your boot logo, find
misplaced (lies and BDMem.

* Parbanch - Network two Amigas
via a special Parallel cable. Ideal
for CDTV owners to use as a
CD-ROM drtw.

Programming

- ACE AmigaBASiC Compiler 1 r 1 -
Speed u:i \our BA£ C prog^'x
into fast executable binary.
: ncljdet; linker and aaser-ic.e:.

' Pascal - Two disks, PASCAL
includes PCQ compiler, A6SK,
Blink, Debugger, Mon, examples
andi PCQ source.

Printer Drivers

■ General - A saEection of over 100
drivers covering almost every
known printer. Includes special
drivers lor 24pin dot matrix
primers and posiscfipl-

■ Canon Drivers - Covers Canon
BJ1 0.130,300

■ HP Drivers - Covers HP500. SBQ,
500C, 550C and LaserJet E.ll.llr.

ORDER FORM - Storm Front Studios, P.O. Box 288, Gladesville 2111

June 95 AGAR

Name

Address

Post Code

Day Phone

card no. nnnn nnnn nana de

ValidVo \ VisaaB/CUM/CI COD LChequeC

Signature

Public Domain Disks

Please bill me each month for your
NEW disk/s of the month offer : L

f //k'A

Digital gee-gees

Describing this as a "spotting"
is probably going too far, because
we found it out in conversation
with a bloke who works at Struc-
tured Data Systems. This company
has produced a horse racing game,
based on an A4000 with a cranked
68040 and extra graphics boards.
The simulated races look very real
- and the money wagered on them
by punters looks completely real,
because it is. Expect to see it at a
club or cruise ship near you soon.

TURF O.ASS1C STAKES

Alternative viewing

Stuart Brightwell of Wen-
douree, Vic, spotted a few of our
beloved computers. He sighted an
SBS documentary on neo-Nazis
who, among other activities, edited
propaganda films with an A2000 -
but we've had that sighting before.
Sill on SBS, an Hungarian film
called "Game Over" featured the
main character using an A500 with
DPaint HI to make animations for
a game he was writing - and we've
had that one, too.

Further emphasising his cos-
mopolitan taste in entertainment,
though, Stuart also spotted a C64
receiving weather reports in the ac-
claimed French flick "Three
Colours: Red".

Boom!

Michael Harrold, who has
graced these pages before, e-mailed

us from someone else's account
(oo-er) with three sightings and a
heartfelt plea for a free subscrip-
tion, not on grounds of poverty but
to save him the loss of Amiga Re-
view reading time due to having to
go to the newsagent and buy the
mag. Novel, but not novel enough,
because two of his sightings were
ones we've had before - the state
of the art A500 on Healthy
Wealthy and Wise running Kind-
words, and the Lucas With The
Lid Off video clip. The other one's
nearly bizarre enough to make it
on its own, though - Channel 9
news, 20th of July, A500 blown
up, reason? Immolated possum on
nearby power lines.

Whlnge, whinge, whinge . . .

Joshua Pryor e-mailed us
with news of a J084S in use
in a doctor/scientist's office
in "Seduction", and an A500
on the front of a home insur-
ance pamphlet - although he
couldn't remember the compa-
ny. He then complained about
the amount of stuff he'd sent
in for no reward, and we'd
have to agree - yes, Josh, life
stinks sometimes, doesn't it?

Megaband uses Amiga!

Lazaros Papavasiliou is the
first to tell us about the first track
on the first CD of Pink Floyd's lat-
est, "P.U.L.S.E.", which features
the distinctive tones of an Amiga
saying "For millions of years-
/Mankind lived just like the ani-
mals/Then something happened
which unleashed the power of our
imagination/We learned to talk."
Apparently the Amiga has a bit
more to say later in the track. This
isn't a bad one, and his subscrip-
tion beg was noticeable without
being embarrassing, but unfortu-
nately this next spotting came
along too.

Farrell ring-in

Keith Connor of Southbank,
Vic, did not spot an Amiga at all.
What he did spot, in the credits for
Beyond 2000, was the name of an
associate producer - Andrew Far-
rell. We hasten to reassure our
readers that unless he owns a de-
vice that gives one an extra 16
hours in each day and keeps an
adrenalin drip in his hip pocket,
this is not THE Andrew Farrell,
distinguished editor and proprietor
of this magazine. Keith did a big
suck for a free sub despite not hav-
ing actually fulfilled the terms of
the contract, so out of sheer per-
versity we're going to give him
one, just to annoy the rest of you.
We're in this for the power trip, in
case you hadn't noticed.

Two cut-out-and-keep
pictures of the one true
Andrew Farrell, for easy

identification of fakes.

=>4

72

AMIGA Review

.. . -.

A

Continued from page 21 . . .

%
We feel the clear meaning of these

statements is that the Lascelles soft-
ware is not very good, and that it
seems roughly on a par with the (simi-
larly not very good) PD alternatives.
As far as Tom's concerned, and we
agree, if this is as good as it gets then
you might as well get some PD educa-
tional programs for a few dollars a
disk rather than much the same thing
for five times as much.

We're all for good Amiga educa-
tional software. There's some per-
fectly acceptable stuff out there - the
Insight Dinosaurs and Insight Tech-
nology packages for the CD32, for ex-
ample. One product we'd particularly
like to see, though nobody seems to
have any idea how to make it, is a
front end for IBM packages like En-
carta that allows you to access their
vast databases on your Amiga, with-

out spending big bucks on a tempera-
mental hardware emulator or dying of
old age using a software one.

We're not after something "fanci-
er". We just want to see something
more functional. There are scores of
freely distributable educational pro-
grams as good (or bad) as the Las-
celles $20 packages, and there are
plenty of books, just as full of Aus-
tralian information, that do a better
job than Australian Graphic Encyclo-
pedia. Just because something is the
only package of its kind for the Amiga,
and hence unavoidably the best of its
kind for the Amiga, does not mean
that it's actually worth using.

And there are plenty of packages
not produced by commercial educa-
tional software houses that are still
useful for educational purposes. Paint
programs, word processors, strategy

games and the like all have their place
in the classroom, and are likely to in-
terest kids a great deal more than un-
derproduced, poorly designed pack-
ages such as these. As you say, few
Australian schools use Amigas, and in
our opinion the reason is the low
quality of a lot of Amiga educational
software. There are some good pack-
ages, but IBM and Macintosh based
packages blow the Amiga opposition
into the weeds in quantity and quality,
even without Australian-specific infor-
mation, so it's scarcely surprising that
they're the machines that get used. It
would be wonderful if Amigas were
popular in the education market, and
it is quite possible that they will be,
now that Amiga Technologies is forg-
ing ahead again. But that doesn't
make bad software any better.

GSOFT Computers
Shop 4, 2 Anderson Walk
Smithfield 5114
South Australia

STUDIO V2 - The premier Amiga printing program.
Supports all popular Inket and Laser printers including
new HP, Canon and Epsons.

GSOFT TOWER CASES For A4000 and A1 200
A1200 - with or without ZORO expansion
A4000 - 7 ZORO slots including 2 video slots!
Professionally LASER cut chassis, full connector
identification, 220watt power supplies. CALL for
more details. (Dealer enquires welcome)

NON-U near VIDEO editing VLAB Motion,
Toccata audio, performance by WARP engine - WOW.
If you are into video then GSOFT can put together an
excellent package that will give you professional
results. Remember, its not just the cards that make
this system zing., there is a host of ancillary
packages, such as Hollywood FX that really add the
flexibility to this system. GSOFT has the expertise
and experience to advise in this field.

DigiMax - 3D digitising hardware

Available
NOW

Fax (08) 284 0922

Phone (08) 284 1266

South Australia's most extensive range of
AMIGA products:

us-
es-
us-
is-

US'

«s-

CD ROMS,

Software,

Hardware (new and used),

Expansion peripherals,

Hard drive upgrades,

Maintenance (Hardware and Software)

Repairs and Spare parts

All the latest goodies for your AMIGA at
competitive prices.

STOP PRESS

CyberStorms and Cybergraphic cards
should be in stock by the time you reac :~ s

AMIGA Review

73

Welcome to this months Amiga Art
Gallery. If you have some graphic art to
contribute, why not shoot us a disk - or
modem the file to our new number on :-
(02) 550 2499.

Please include your name, tel no and how you
created the imaqe, in a text file.

Alessandro Tasora

.i

mm

736 x 580, 24bit. Created with Imagine II,
By Alessandro Tasora.

736 x 546, 24bH, Created with Real 3D 2.49.
By Anders Erlandsson.

iGO. x 800;-. 2#bit„ Created with Lightwave 3.5.
plain J. Pudsey.

By Ha

736 x 560, 24b it, Created
By Anders Erlandsson,

;# : ]

A

800 x 600, 24b it, Created with Real 3D.
By Jesper Johag.

640 x
ByKie

U),&

t, Created with Lightwave 3.5,
■bins.

.

ay

) x 600, 24bit, Created with POV-
Henrik Engstrom.

'isi£

AiiONS

How to speak
modem

By Daniel Rutter

• One of the most confusing areas
of personal computers is modems,
and more specifically modem com-
mands. While every decent modem
comes with a manual detailing at
least the standard, common Hayes
compatible modem commands,
this doesn't mean people actually
read this section, much less under-
stand it.

If two modems won't talk to
each other, there are many possible
reasons. In this age of supposed
universal modem compatibility, it
shouldn't matter how your mo-
dem's set up, as long as you have a
modem capable of 2400 Bps oper-
ation or better and stick to the al-
most universal 8 data bits, no par-
ity, 1 stop bit (8N1). You might
not connect as efficiently as you
should, but you should connect and
stay connected and all should be
rosily wonderful .

But all, frequently, isn't.
This is because there's some
room for different interpretations
in comms protocol specs, and if
there isn't the modem makers tend
to interpret anyway. Subtle differ-
ences in implementation of what
are nominally identical systems
can produce strange failures. Most
are explicable after some detective
work, but some are best classified
as phase-of-moon (POM) related.

The usual symptom of incom-
patibility is two modems just plain
refusing to connect, or refusing to
connect at a speed they both appar-
ently support. The problems can
often be solved by adroit applica-
tion of the appropriate commands,
the standard for which was invent-
ed by those grandfathers of the
modern modem, Hayes.

The commands listed here are
the ones you're likely to use. There
are more codes than I've listed,
and every modem has its own
swag of peculiar S registers and its
own AT commands that you'll
have to check your manual to de-
code, but the basic stuff is stan-
dard.

All of these commands, if sent
by themselves, have to be prefixed
with AT. You can use "at" as well,
but if your AT is in lower case,
any other alphabetic characters in
your command have to he too.

If you're issuing several com-
mands at once, such as in a modem
initialisation string, you only need
an AT at the start. Thus you cari
send AT&F&K0S0=2, which is
the same as AT&F plus AT&KO
plus ATS0=2, You can insert
spaces in between the commands
(AT&F &K0 S0=2) if you like.

+++ - The standard escape code. If
you're online and you type +++, your
modem will drop to command mode.
You're still connected, but nothing you
type will be sent. This lets you tweak
the modem without logging off.

A ■ Instant answer. ATA makes the
modem immediately go off hook and
try to answer an incoming call.

A/ - Repeat last command. This is
the only command that doesn't have AT
in front of it - it's just A/.

D - Dial. By itself, ATD makes your
modem go. off hook and initiate a con-
nection as if it dialled the other modem
- but without dialling. If you've hooked
two modems together with a phone ca-
bic or you've already got a voice con-
nection on the same line, it'll work. Is-
sue ATD to one modem, ATA to the
other, then hang up any phones. "

If you follow D with a number, your
modem will dial that number. If you
prefix the number with T or P, the mo-
dem will dial in Tone or Pulse mode -
most modems default to tone dial, and
few telephone exchanges still require
pulse, Nonetheless, many people still
reflexiveiy type ATDT to make sure
they avoid prolonged clicking.

The D command has a few more op-
lions which you probably won't need to
use:-- check your modem manual if
you 're curious.

£■ - E, for Eclidj controls whether
your modem will repeat keystrokes
back to the terminal in command mode.

78

AMIGA Review

When you're sending commands to the
modem, not sending what you type
down the line, you'll see what you type
if echo's turned on (ATE1) and you
won't if it's off (ATEO). Your terminal
program's "local echo" setting automat-
ically displays every character you type
as well as every character sent from the
modem, and should be off, as it'll make
you see everything ttwwiiccee..

H - H, for Hook, is not a command
you should have to use - your terminal
program can do it with a hotkey.
+++ATHO is the standard hang-up
string; sent to a modem, it drops it to
command mode and puts the modem
back on hook. ATH1 takes a modem
off-hook, and is pretty useless.

I - J, for Information, can be fol-
lowed by a number from to 9 depend-
ing on the modem, and what you get de-
pends on what the modem manufactur-
ers decided to put there. Manufacturers
commonly muck aboul with these com-
mands. Check your manual.

L - AT1J) or 1 sets internal speaker
volume low, ATL2 is medium, ATL3 is
high Some modems, for example Mae-
stros, say OK to this command but
don't actually do anything. Their vol-
ume control is a trimpot inside the mo-
dem. Happy twiddling,

M - ATMO turns off the speaker,
fall stop. ATM1 is the default, and
leaves the speaker on until a carrier's
detected, then turns it off; ATM2 turns
the speaker on all the time and will
drive you mad, and ATM3 turns the
speaker on during connect sequences,
but not dialling.

N - To force your modem to connect
3t a specific speed, use ATNO, The
speed is set by S register 37 (see be-
low). ATN1, the default, leaves the mo-
dem free to choose its own speed.

O - If you've dropped to command
mode with +++, ATO (letter O, not ze-
ro) puts you back online. This is the
same as ATOO (letter O. then zero);
ATOi also forces a retrain, where the
modems renegotiate the connection.

S - S is the command for setting S
registers, the modem's internal memory
locations. You set an S register with
ATSx=n, where x is the register number
and n is the value. Type ATSn? to see
the contents of register n. S registers
you need to know about include:
- This is how many rings your modem
will wait before automatically answer-

ing. ATS0=2 sets it to two rings,
ATS0=0 will turn off auto answer.

6 - This S register sets the maximum
time the modem will wait for a dial
tone. You can set it from 2 to 255, in
seconds, and it's handy if you're calling
out on some antique muiti-line system
that takes a while to notice a phone's
been picked up, or something.

7 - This is to carrier detect as S6 is to
dial tone detect, and has the same possi-
ble values. If you're calling somewhere
that lakes a while to connect, crank up
S7. Otherwise, keep it low, as it saves
long periods of warbling.

10 - This register sets the delay, in
tenths of a second from 1 to 255, be-
tween carrier dropping and the modem
hanging up. If you're on a disgustingly
bad line, ATS10=255 gives 25.5 sec-
onds for the modems to find each other
again. On clean lines, keep it lower.

11 - Sets the touch tone duration, from
50 to 255 milliseconds. Lower settings
dial faster; set it too low and your ex-
change won't catch the beeps.

37 - Sets the transfer speed ATNO locks
the modem to. Value locks to the
speed the modem got its last AT com-
mand at; 1, 2 and 3 lock to 300Bps, 5 is
1200, 6 is 2400, 8 is 4800, 9 is 96O0, 10
Is 12200, II is 14400, 12 is 7200.

W ■ Write - See Z.

X - This deals with how the modem
dials and what it says when it connects.
ATX0 sends basic result codes on con-
nect, and blind dials - it won't listen for
a dialtone and won't detect busy tones-;
XI gives extended codes but is other-
wise the same. X2 is extended codes,
still no busy detect, but the modem
waits for dialtone. X3 is extended
codes, busy detection, no dialtone de-
tection, and X4 detects dialtone and
busy and sends extended codes. Use the
dumber X settings if your modem has
trouble detecting djaltones or busy sig-
nals, otherwise use X4.

Z - The reset code. ATZ or A. 17.0 is
the same as turning off and on, and
ATZ4 resets to factory settings. ATZ1
to ATZ3 set (he three definable user set-
tings; these start off as factory settings,
but if you do ATZ2, for example,
change S registers and other settings
around and then do AT&W, you'll have
saved the new settings as user setting 2.

&C - AT&C1, the normal setting,
makes your modem only report DCD
(Data Carrier Detect) if it Teatly HAS

detected a carrier and really DOES have

a connection. AT&C0 - eave

DCD on all the time. If your moc. -
DCD (or CD, as it's often labelled) light
never goes off, it's been ifcCO-ed.

&D - This controls the modem' : e-
sponse to DTR - the Data Terminal
Ready line which the compu tc
tell the modem it's alive and running a
terminal program - DTR will turn off,
or "drop" if you quit the terminal pro-
gram via menu option, keystroke, crash
or reboot. &D0 causes the modem to ig-
nore DTR, which means crashes won't
kill your connection. &D1 will drop the
modem into command mode if DTR
goes from on to off - if you crash, you
can now rerun your terminal and send
an ATO to get back online. &D2 makes
the modem hang up, go to command
mode and disable auto answer
(ATS0=0) when DTR drops - this is the
setting you use if you set "drop DTR to
hang up" in your terminal program.
&D3 wiO reset the modem if DTR
drops.

&K - This is for changing flow con-
trol. RTS/CTS (Request To Send/Clear
To Send) handshaking lets your modem
and computer tell each other when
they're being sent too much data to deal
with, and invoke a pause while they
pass the info on, and you can activate it
with AT&K3. AT&K0 turns off flow
control, and AT&K4 activates
XON/XOFF flow control, the old soft-
ware method that sends flow control in-
formation with the data and is not as
good as RTS/CTS. AT&K5 activates
"transparent" XON/XOFF, which is still
not as good,

&R - This command also deals with
CTS/RTS hardware handshaking.
AT&R0 makes CT'S behave properly,
only turning on when there reaily are no
data transfer problems, AT&R turns
CTS on permanently.

Compression control - What AT
command controls data compression
(MNl'-5) and error correction (MNP-
4)? Good question. Every manufacturer
seertis to pick their own for this one -
check your manual. Unless you're
transferring a pile of uncompressed text
or similar readily compressible data,
leave MNP- 5 off. If problems are hap-
pening, disable MNP -4 as well, as dif-
fering interpretations can cause argu-
ments between modems,

U

AMIGfi~Review

79

.

JjU'WA

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